


Hamilton Gregg Wants To Kill Your Face

by maggiemerc



Category: Grey's Anatomy, Rizzoli & Isles
Genre: F/F, Femslash, Mystery, Romance, Romantic Drama
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-17
Updated: 2012-10-20
Packaged: 2017-11-10 03:46:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 59,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/461876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggiemerc/pseuds/maggiemerc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fresh on the heels of the season two finale Rizzoli is trying to manage her confusing feelings for Maura and the case of a criminal from her past. Her hunt to stop him before he kills again takes her to Seattle, and straight into the sights of her ex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Before you ask, no I will not be changing the title to something that more reflects the serious nature of this piece. 
> 
> Yes Hamilton Gregg will attempt to kill someone's face.

Maura still wasn’t talking to her despite every effort on Jane’s part. At the hospital, while they waited to learn to outcomes of both shootings she’d made overtures. Maura had shifted away.

“Give her time,” Ma had said in a soothing voice, her hand rubbing circles on Jane’s back. “You shot her father. That’s bound to make anyone cranky.”

“And he lived. And the guy—my boyfriend—lived. He shot him. Shouldn’t I be mad?”

Her mother agreed that she should, and though Jane tried to get angry or upset over the shooting of Gabriel Dean she could not. Not when Maura’s pained cries still rung in her ears. Not when she still felt the gun in her hand firing despite every part of her screaming at what a bad idea it was.

It was something Dean noticed when she finally came to his bedside. Though he’d been shot he’d remained conscious through much of the ordeal and wasn’t too pleased that she ran to Maura rather then seeing to him first.

“Maybe I ought to recuperate at home…in DC.”

She found herself nodding in agreement. “Not the far to John Hopkins from there.” Never mind that they were currently in a very expensive government paid for room at Mass Gen. Thankfully Dean wasn’t up on hospital rankings like Jane was and he smiled weakly.

“I always thought that was here in Boston,” he said.

She shook her head. “Baltimore. It’s a nice place.”

“You been there?”

And his conversational tone belied the real question, “You and Maura go there?” And had he asked that question she would have said no. But he asked the more round about one so she said, “Yeah. Went with a friend for their five year reunion.”

They both let that one sink in. He was thinking Maura and she made no effort to change his mind. “I’m uh…pretty tired right now Jane. Mind if I get some sleep?”

She smiled and kissed his cheek and turned the lights out as she left and when she came by two days later he was gone. Off to convalesce somewhere where a woman would swoon at his bedside instead of stalk the halls waiting on a best friend in another ward.

Two wards actually. And two hospitals. Maura’s mother, a ridiculously wealthy woman with more social connections than a Hilton, was naturally at Mass Gen. Maura’s father—her birth father—was at the far less illustrious Suffolk County Jail.

Jane hadn’t spoken to Maura but from her mother she’d learned that she was spending much of her days driving between the two institutions, one the finest teaching hospital on the East Coast and the other a place that regularly reeked of vomit and beer soaked urine.

Otherwise she was busy at work sending lackeys to cases that Jane had or sitting at home ignoring Jane out in her guesthouse.

“Seriously,” Ma said one day over a simmering pot of tomato sauce, “give her time. She’ll come around.”

“Yeah? And how do you know?”

“Well I’m still living in her guest house aren’t I?”

So Jane tried to be patient. But eventually the dull monotony of guilt, grief, work and her mother’s place wore on Jane. She needed to do something. She tried running and bicycling to talk off the building edge she’d developed but neither sport did anything to help it. Then she tried pick up games of basketball or sparring with fellow police officers but that ended when she got kicked out of a game for excessive elbowing and knocked Frankie out during a friendly sparring match.

Finally too keyed up and lacking in options she made the decision to call the racetrack and schedule a high speed drive. It was a little pricey but as she wasn’t going to very expensive restaurants for no reason with Maura any more she could afford it.

The day of “Jane’s Attempt To Drive Off Emotions” as she privately called it was one of those crystal clear winter days where the wind had bite but the sun shined brightly.

She made coffee, took a shower and ate some powdered donuts she found in the back of her pantry. Just as she was leaving she remembered the shoes Maura had given for her birthday earlier that year. 

They were tucked away in her hall closet and when she pulled them down a box of old keepsakes came tumbling after.

It wasn’t a box she frequented often. The items in it were all mementos of a time she’d spent more than three years trying to forget, but as she cleaned up the mess she made and put the box back in order she found a photo taken at another birthday party years before. It was a good picture of her, and Frankie and Tommy both had smiles bigger than she’d even seen on them since they were in elementary school.

She tucked the photo into her pocket, and the shoes into her bag and headed for work.

  


#

Jane arrived to an unusually quiet office. Korsak and Frost were missing, the phones weren’t ringing and Maura was—well she was never there any more.

Jane took the opportunity to shove her driving shoes into the bottom drawer of her desk and look for some tape so she could put the photo up on her monitor.

Frost came in soon after and immediately noticed the photo. “Woah. Who’s the hottie with you and your brothers,” he asked.

“An old family friend.” It was a statement so close to the truth it actually sounded believable when she said it.

“How come I’ve never met her?”

“Because she doesn’t live here. Where’s Korsak?”

Frost shrugged, “No idea. He got a call as soon as he came in and left. Where does she live?”

“In a place far out of your league.”

Suitably put down Frost made himself busy with work and Jane tried to do the same, but her eyes kept straying to the photo. It was taken before Tommy hit a man and before Frankie joined the force. The woman was smiling brightly as she often did. Just seeing that smile made Jane ache with a homesickness she thought evaporated years before.

It must have been this whole fight with Maura. Some of the emotions of it were too similar. The situations too familiar. Or maybe it was because Jane desperately needed a friend who would listen to her process the events of the last few weeks. Someone who would smile and nod and put a comforting hand on her knee and offer no judgement and ask for nothing in return.

Jane got no work done the rest of the day. She made attempts at writing up reports and handling desk work for recent cases but more often than not she found herself reliving past events and regretting the spur of the moment idea to bring the photo to work and put it up on her monitor.

What would Korsak say if he saw it? Or her mother? Those were lectures she’d sooner avoid. It was a sudden snap decision to take it down. She’d already wasted a day staring. If she kept it up she’d probably lose a week to thinking about a life already lived. But before Jane could take the photo down Korsak came in and made a beeline for her.

“Where you been all day,” she asked. She leaned back in her chair and away from her monitor in the hopes that he wouldn’t spy the photo.

But whatever had kept him out of the office also had him worked up. “We need to talk Jane.”

“About what?”

“Hamilton Gregg was released three weeks ago and he’s missed his last two meetings with his parole officer.”

Suddenly white noise raging and loud enough to be the beating of her own heart and the blood coursing through her head snuck up on Jane. “How,” was all she could say. 

He shook his head, “No idea.”

Action.

She pushed herself up and shrugged on her coat—snapping up the photo on her monitor in the process. “I have to go,” she muttered.

“What? Where?’

Frost was now realizing something was wrong. “What’s going on?”

“Does she know?”

Korsak shook his head again, every ounce the ineffectual police officer, “Department of Corrections doesn’t have a number for her.”

“So Gregg is out there and she’s unaware. And until this moment no one could even tell me?” She glared at him, “The arresting officer.”

Then Korsak tried to approach her, “You need to calm down Jane.”

“No. I need to go.”

She fled the office and completely forgot her racing shoes. But if Gregg was out she’d have adrenaline rushes soon enough.

  


#

Jane would be there again. Sitting back there in the guesthouse with her mother. Patiently waiting for Maura to make the first move. To come out and open a line of communication. Since her father’s incarceration and Agent Dean’s transfer Jane came over every day. When her mother was there the detective stayed on her couch sipping a beer and staring at the television. When she wasn’t there Jane was polite enough to wait in her car. Her actions were not dependent on Maura. She’d find Jane sitting in her car or asleep on her mother’s couch no matter the time or day. It was Jane’s routine. Work. Home. Maura’s.

Maura’s own routine was more involved. She wasn’t simply a police officer. She was the Chief Medical Examiner for the state of Massachusetts. She had hundreds of employees to manage. Countless more cases to oversee. And she had not one, but two parents recovering from major surgery. Admittedly one was just a biological parent and her interactions with him were limited due to his residency in the Suffolk County Jail. As the Chief Medical Examiner she had more access to her biological father then another woman might, but it was hardly the same as her visitations with her mother. Who was healing well and would be released within the next two weeks.

But the travel from the jail to the hospital to work was exhausting. So each evening she returned home, made certain Jane was sleeping on her mother’s couch or in her car, and went to bed. She did not speak with Jane. She tried, and often failed, to even acknowledge her.

Had she other friends they would have asked why she continued to let her father’s attacker’s mother live in her guest house. They would have wondered why she didn’t file a restraining order, or at least tell Jane to leave. She had no reasonable answer for them. 

And some part of her hoped that the sense of betrayal, the dark ache that consumed her, would fade. That she would look at Jane and not feel a righteous hatred warring with the old familiar feelings she’d carried for so long.

That evening she returned home to find her guesthouse well lit but sans Jane. Her car was missing from the driveway as well. Earlier she’d heard Frost and Korsak referring to some other man Jane had put in jail once upon a time. Perhaps she’d be so busy wrestling emotionally with that news that she’d fail to continue her watch outside Maura’s house.

Maura was in the midst of preparing a delicious pumpkin risotto that would pair nicely with the wine she’d just uncorked when Jane’s car squealed to a stop in her driveway. She involuntarily ducked as Jane stalked through her backyard towards the guesthouse.

By the loud banging on the guesthouse door Maura knew something was amiss.

“Ma! Would you please open up!”

Jane’s voice had always had a remarkable ability to carry. Even over the sound of the radio and the boiling starches Maura could hear her.

Her mother’s voice was equally apt to carry, but was muffled by the walls of the guesthouse.

“Would ya—I don’t want to yell through the door Ma. Just open up!”

More muffled yelling. Maura turned her stove off, took a large sip of wine for fortifying purposes and stepped outside.

“Jane?”

She had not anticipated the effect her voice would have on her one time friend. Though her back was to her Maura could watch Jane’s body visibly tighten. She could see the rise and fall of the other woman’s shoulders indicating deep breaths. Her hands fidgeted briefly—Jane quickly grasped one in the other to still them both. Then she turned and Maura was surprised at her face. There were a quantity and quality of emotions on Jane’s face that Maura had never seen. Heartache, happiness, frustration, reservation. The entirety of the human experience was acting out in the sharp features of the Boston detective’s face. 

Her name came from Jane’s lips like a choked explicative. “Maura.”

“I appreciate you wanting to have a conversation with your mother but can you please keep it down?”

Intellectually speaking Maura knew her words were insufferably rude but she was incapable of stopping herself from being so brusque.

Jane reacted much like she did every time they communicated now. Her head snapped back as though she’d been slapped.

“I’ll go.” Her shoulders had slumped and her hands were now thrust firmly into the front pockets of her coat.

Maura again, could not help herself, “What…what were you doing here?”

Jane took a moment to look back at the guesthouse, “I’ve gotta go on a trip and Ma’s not too happy about it.”

“Where—“

“Hamilton Gregg is out.”

Maura tried to recall the name, but despite a nearly perfect memory that fell just short of photographic she could not place it.

“He was this sleaze,” she continued, “I put away back before I met you. And there’s somebody who needs to know he’s out—someone he might be after.”

“A warning is too good for her,” Mrs. Rizzoli cried—still hiding in the guesthouse.

Jane ignored her mother. Apparently this woman and Mrs. Rizzoli’s feelings for her were nothing new.

“So we’ve been having this particular conversation for over an hour.” To the guesthouse, “I’m going Ma!”

“Don’t be an idiot!” Her mother’s plea would have held more weight if she wasn’t sitting in her home in the dark ostensibly to avoid her daughter.

Jane started to say something to Maura, perhaps to ask for help with her mother, or to tell her how nice her shoes looked, or maybe she was just going to say goodnight, but she stopped herself and instead curtly nodded and left.

Now alone Maura approached the guesthouse, “Angela.”

The other woman swung the door open, “She’s an idiot Maura. A damned idiot.”

Maura could only smile at the comment, because when frustrated with Jane she’d often ventured, at least in her mind, to say the same thing, but she knew that when a parent was insulting their child it wasn’t wise to agree.

“All that woman did was break her heart over and over again and leave her alone so a creep like Hoyt could hurt her and now she’s going to fly across the flipping country to talk to her? I raised my daughter to be smarter then that.”

There was…a great deal of information for Maura to suddenly absorb. And when given the opportunity to ask a question Maura, garishly, asked the most immediate one to present itself.

“She broke her heart?”

“That ex-girlfriend of hers! Who flies all the way to Seattle to talk to an ex?”

That was new information. The kind of information that demanded processing. Angela released it so flippantly. As though she thought Maura already knew about the apparently fluid nature of Jane’s sexuality. Maura did not. But suddenly a great deal was beginning to make sense.

  


#

It was the same doctor that had admitted the last two girls. Which made sense. Jane found the girls alone and dying in the park and she would rush them to the closest hospital, which happened to be the Children’s Hospital Boston. It was always late at night and the staff she found while carrying the frail children into the ER were always the same. So yeah, it made sense that it would be the same doctor treating all three girls.

She gave Jane a firm nod and took this, the third girl, out of her arms. 

Like both times before Jane stepped out of the trauma room and leaned against the wall to wait.

If everything played out exactly as it had before the doctor would come out, sigh and then look at Jane with sad eyes. She’d tell her it was too late and the girl was too far gone. Jane would write a report and send it off to the detectives and go to sleep trying to get another gaunt girl’s face out of her head.

Only tonight was different. The doctor came out and smiled. It was a brilliant smile—like the sun in the morning. Bright and warm and impossible to avoid. She knelt down next to Jane and took her big gangly hand in her smaller one. It was a nice hand. Slim and dexterous with short nails and dark nail polish. 

“She’s alive.”

Jane laughed, because anything else would have been unseemly coming from an officer in uniform, and let her head fall back against the wall.

“She’s dehydrated and malnourished and what was done to her ankles is—but we’ve got her stabilized and we’re going to get her a little healthier and go in and fix it.”

“That’s great news doc.”

The doctor shifted and took a seat on the ground next to Jane. Her smaller hand still clasped Jane’s. “I thought so. Don’t know about you but I couldn’t have handled another one.”

Jane nodded mutely. The doctor’s hand was warm and dry in her own, and she smelled nice. Like some unfrilly shampoo and cologne just delicate enough to keep from being masculine.

“Will that detective be joining us?”

“Korsak? No ma’am. He’s still at the park.”

The doctor nodded and let Jane’s hand go. “I’ve got to go admit our young Jane Doe and schedule her surgery, but afterwards I want to have a drink and celebrate and I want you to join me.”

In another world the doctor’s invitation would have meant a date. In a world where the doctor was a man. In Jane’s world though, she just wished it was a date and that this pediatrician wasn’t just one of those unnaturally sunny people that frequently set Jane’s teeth on edge.

“It’s a date,” she said. Because even though it wasn’t it’d be nice to think it was.

The doctor gave her another warm smile and then looked her over. From the feet straight up to the top of the head. Jane’s experience with women was limited but she knew she was being checked out—by the sunny pediatrician she found extremely attractive.

“It is Officer Rizzoli.” A date with a doctor. If it wasn’t for the whole vagina thing her mother would be proud.

“Seeing as we’re getting drinks and have communed over the survival of a child you really should call me Jane.”

“Then you’ll have to call me Arizona.”

Like the ship. 


	2. Chapter 2

Arizona had been failing at the task of being an “awesome friend.” She’d tried. She brought donuts over after work and sometimes she’d help Teddy pack up some of Henry’s things, but an awesome friend would be more hands on instead of staying in every night having fantastic sex or playing with a perfect baby.

Realizing she’d been slacking Arizona had organized a “girls’ night out” with quickly devolved into a “lady attendings’ night out” because Meredith and Cristina had some twelve hour surgery.

After leaving Sofia with a befuddled Mark Arizona, her wife, and Bailey had dragged Teddy out for drinks. The goal had been to get the other woman rip roaring drunk and then make her sleep in the extra bed they’d stuck in Sofia’s room. But somehow Teddy was still sober and Callie and Bailey were weaving on their stools and giggling.

“So, any big and daring surgeries planned in Peds this week,” Teddy asked. Since Henry’s death Teddy buried herself in her work and spent way too much time looking for big and nasty surgeries to scrub in on. Arizona would find her prowling the Peds hall looking for kids with faulty hearts and failing lungs.

“At least four. And none of them require a cardiothoracic attending.”

Teddy pouted and took a long drought of her beer.

“You’re worse then Bailey.”

Bailey glared at Teddy. Which caused Callie to giggle. Which in turn caused Bailey to giggle. Which just made Teddy more miserable. 

“We need more drinks,” Arizona decided. She scooted off her stool and paused to steady herself. Maybe Callie and Bailey weren’t the only ones a few sheets to the wind. Careful not to shake her head, because head shaking always made it worse, she plodded towards the bar. One foot in front of the other.

“Four beers and a bottle of tequila please.”

The bartender eyed her and then looked over her shoulder at the three other women.

“I can do that, but it’s the last booze you’re getting tonight.”

“Aw. Joe. That’s not fair. It’s not like we’re driving.” She tried to pout but a lesbian pouting at a gay man was almost as effective as a straight man flirting with a lesbian.

“And besides Joe, Arizona’s got a hollow leg.”

Joe eyed the commenter as he poured the beer. Arizona tried not to. She tried to rationalize what she was hearing. That voice. Low and husky with just enough gravel to temper the sexiness. That voice was in Boston being an amazing detective. It wasn’t in a bar in Seattle.

But she turned and saw Jane watching her with those dark eyes. She was inscrutable and beautiful and everything Arizona had lost. The alcohol lubricating Arizona’s veins took that moment to tilt her and she stumbled. But Jane was off her stool and steadying her in the breath of a second.

She still smelled like Jane. All masculine and feminine at once with a touch of beer on her breath. And the hand steadying her felt like Jane’s hand. And the warmth. It was all so unmistakable.

“Aren’t you in Boston?”

Clearly not. But seeing her here was too unbelievable to be real.

Jane gave her one of her little half smiles. “I came to see you.”

“In a bar.”

“At your apartment first. But you moved and the landlady wouldn’t give me your new address. Then at work. But you were gone and they wouldn’t give me an address either.”

“Then how’d—“

“I was just getting a drink before heading off to look for a hotel. And maybe hoping you still liked a nightcap after work.”

Joe took that moment to set down a tray of beers and tequila.

“Or a lot of them,” Jane observed.

“They’re for my friends,” she said weakly.

Arizona tried to grab the tray but stumbled again. Jane quickly held her up with one arm and grabbed the tray with the other. Then she led Arizona back to her table where the three other doctors watched with wide and wary eyes.

“This is Jane,” she said. And once, a lifetime ago, that would have explained everything. But here, in Seattle she didn’t talk about Jane or Boston or the people she’d known. She was a mysterious transplant devoid of roots. A true military brat. Jane’s name was nothing to her friends and wife.

Jane set the tray down and waved.

“She’s from Boston.”

Teddy perked up at that, “Oh! Mass Gen?”

Jane frowned, “Boston PD.”

“You’re a cop,” Callie asked.

“Detective.”

Arizona remembered the day Jane made detective. They’d celebrated. Not with excessive drinking like the others, but gentle kisses stolen just outside the hospital. Up against the wall in a frigid Boston winter.

“You deserve this,” she’d said, her lips pressed against Jane’s. Soaking up the heat she’d so readily offered.

Cold hands had wrapped around her waist, sneaking under her scrubs. “I had help.”

Bailey leveled one of her best gazes at Jane and asked, only slurring a little bit, “What on earth brought you to Seattle?”

“She has a point,” said Teddy, “winter in Seattle is rain, rain and more rain. Mixed with a snow that turns to this gross gray slush. And hipsters.”

Callie nodded, “So many hipsters. You wave a stick and hit someone wearing giant nerd glasses.”

“I came to see Arizona.”

That brought the table’s attention back to her. She avoided her wife’s sobering gaze and tugged on Jane’s hand. “And with that we’re going to go have a drink and catch up,” she exclaimed cheerfully.

With new drinks and a large pot of coffee they sat at another table up front. It was darker there, and though it was near the entrance it was less populated then the rest of the bar because of the chill coming in off the street.

But Arizona had survived Maryland and Massachusetts and German winters and Jane was Boston born and raised. The cold mattered little to either of them.

“Long way to catch up with an ex.”

Jane was watching Arizona’s hands. No. Her ring finger.

“You got married.” 

“I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t figure out how.”

“So you just figured you’d wait until we ran into each other?”

“We live on opposite ends of the continent Jane. Seemed reasonable.”

Jane laughed bitterly, “Ma will faint when she finds out you got married.”

“And then she’ll light a few votives to saints because it wasn’t you I married.”

“And she’ll donate her paycheck to the church. Just to be extra thankful.”

It was Arizona’s turn to laugh. “How is she anyways?”

“She left dad and is living in a friend’s guesthouse and working in the police commissary.”

“Her friend or yours?”

“Mine.”

Arizona winced, “That can’t be fun.”

“It is a bit more Ma than I’m used to.”

“And you?”

“Can’t a woman turn up out of nowhere to visit an ex-fiancee?”

“Not after three years.” It wasn’t the time that made their sudden reunion absurd though. “Not after what I did.”

Jane laughed. It was a dark bark of laughter. The kind that escaped a wary cop’s mouth over the body of a dead girl. “I did worse.”

Not to Arizona. This was a fresh wound. Henry’s death or the brief loss of Zola. 

“Jane,” she whispered, her voice a ghost in the cool air wafting from the night beyond the bar, “What happened?”

She seemed to think on that. Stared long and hard at her beer before taking a long drink and setting it down. Still staring at the pale yellow liquid she said, “I lost everything.”

When their engagement had ended on the heels of Timothy’s death Arizona had been a shell of a woman. She remembered cold gray Boston days staring out towards the Atlantic and pondering her future. She’d been sluggish and dim. Every action took a half second longer then it should have. Jane would pull her into bed and wrap around her like a blanket and the ache would remain and Jane’s touch, her living touch, her sexy touch, was cold and dry like the touch of a corpse.

Arizona had fallen apart back then and Jane had been helpless. That last fight Arizona had shattered her lover as succinctly as she’d been shattered and they’d sat on their couch staring at an empty fireplace and attempting to process the gravity of their loss.

And Jane had been healthier and happier that awful night then she was now.

Arizona started to reach out to the first woman she’d loved. To the woman that even now she loved.

“And Hamilton Gregg is out.”

Her hand froze on the table. Words more terrifying then the announcement of a pregnancy in an elevator.

####

“That is an ex-girlfriend.”

Callie needed them to agree with her because otherwise she was crazy and reading way too much into her wife’s reactions in a lonely corner of the bar with a drop dead gorgeous brunette.

Bailey and Teddy didn’t say anything. They just nodded.

“My wife has just ditched us to catch up with an ex-girlfriend.”

Another round of nods.

“That I’ve never heard of.”

No nods this time, but Teddy took a big gulp of her beer.

“Have you two heard of her?”

Now it was two head shakes.

“I’m not crazy to say this is totally socially unacceptable right? Ditching your wife and friends to hang out with an ex?”

“Completely,” Teddy agreed. “Like refusing to tell your best friend her husband is dead!”

“Or being Meredith Grey,” Bailey added.

“Or flying to freaking Africa—I’m going over there.”

Callie tried to stand. Stumbled. Then she pitched forward as a wave of nausea overwhelmed her.

“Are you gonna—“

She held up a hand to stop Teddy before she uttered that word. Because if that word was said then she really would release a volley of bile and alcohol that’d put them all to shame.

“I’m good,” she choked out.

“You look like you’re going to throw up,” Bailey observed.

The bile ran up her throat. A little—tasting of rancid Blue Moon—touched her tongue. She swallowed it back down and straightened back up.

“I’m good. Really. Vomit free.”

Bailey stared at her face and Teddy stared at the front of her blouse. She looked down.

“Oh gross.”

Then she ran out the door and into the night before she spewed all over Joe’s bar and was banned for life. 

Teddy came out a little later. “You all right,” she asked—even though it was clear that Callie was anything but all right.

“I’m never drinking again!”

“You want to go home?”

“After I puke on the leggy ex.”

She tried to stumble back towards the bar but Teddy caught her. “Not a good idea.”

“But that’s what exes are there for.”

“Arizona doesn’t puke on your exes.”

“That’s because one is dead and the other is the father of her child.”

Teddy tugged one of Callie’s arms over her shoulder so she could better support her and turned them towards Callie’s apartment. “You’re going home.”

“But—“

“But I’m tired and done watching you all get drunk for the night. So I’m taking you home and tucking you into bed and then coming back here and dragging your wife home and doing the same thing.”

“What about Bailey?”

The woman in question took that moment to exit the bar. “I’m taking a cab.”

  


####

They talked until closing. Sipping coffee and chatting about everything they’d missed in the last three years. They talked about work and love and shooting rampages. Arizona talked about her wife and Africa and Jane talked about Maura. Again and again she returned to talking about the straight best friend she’d lost in the firefight.

Arizona spied Teddy peaking back into the bar and checking on them after taking a drunk Callie home, but she nodded soberly and her best friend pointed at a cab and smiled sadly. Presumably to return home and wallow in her grief like she did most nights. Arizona was a bad friend for not joining her. 

And a bad wife for leaving Callie to the mercies of Teddy when she was clearly drunk and sick.

But she’d been a bad fiancé before she’d been a bad friend or wife. She owed it to Jane to listen. So she did. Finally Joe kicked the two women out, but not before Arizona snagged a bottle of tequila for the road.

At Jane’s raised eyebrow she shrugged.

They put on their coats and took a long walk sharing the bottle and letting the alcohol warm them up. Then they ended up on the curb outside Arizona and Callie’s apartment. Their hands touched each time one passed the bottle to the other. First the touches were brief, but as the bottle grew lighter the touches grew longer. 

But before the touches could become too intimate and the two women could find themselves falling back into sensations each had buried years before the bottle went dry. So they settled on holding hands and leaning against each other for warmth.

“I should really go find a hotel. Or motel. Or a place with a bed.”

“You don’t have a place?”

“I spent over a grand flying out here. I can’t afford half the hotels in this town.”

Arizona burrowed into Jane’s side and wrapped a cool arm around the slimmer woman’s waist. “Is this your way of begging for a couch to sleep on,” she murmured.

“I don’t beg.”

“We’ve got a bed you can sleep in. And you get your own shower and everything.”

Arizona rubbed a cold hand across the hot skin of Jane’s waist causing Jane to yelp and pull away. “You’re drunk,” she said half laughing.

Arizona laughed too, “So drunk.”

Jane, being the more sober one, pulled herself up and then helped Arizona do the same. “We should go to bed.”

“Okay. But you can’t sleep with me. I’m married. And I have a baby.”

She ignored Jane’s pained expression at that reminder. Jane had always wanted kids with her. Just one. Maybe two. Adopted.

Arizona didn’t want to think anymore. Didn’t want to be reminded of the pain she’d inflicted or the pain that she would inevitably inflict. So she let Jane half carry her inside and once in her apartment she passed out fully clothed on her bed next to her wife who softly snored.

And who would have a lot of questions in the morning.

#

“So you’re what, a pediatrician?”

Arizona frowned. “What? No. Gross.”

“But you work at a children’s hospital and you’re a doctor.”

“I’m a resident. Part of my surgical rotation is at Children’s.”

Jane couldn’t help frowning, even though she really wanted to seem kind of cool and okay with cutting up little kids.

“Hopefully, if the stars align correctly I’ll then be a surgical fellow and then I’ll be a pediatric surgeon.”

“Which is like a pediatrician,” Jane clarified.

“Only with more cutting.”

Jane involuntarily frowned again and Arizona laughed.

“Aw. Does surgery scare you?”

She winced, “After you see a couple of eviscerated hobos and folks mangled in cars the idea of voluntarily slicing into people gives me the skeeveys.” And as an after thought, “Sorry.”

Arizona wasn’t offended though, she was just smiling that big bright smile, “See that? That already makes you better than the last girl I dated. Blood made her faint.”

Date? Was Arizona…Jane wasn’t certain but her policewoman’s intuition told her a pass was being made. Only she’d flirted with all of one girl in her life and that had led to lots of sex, but only after a lot more beer then she’d already had. “I bet she was one of those frilly girls who wears a lot of pink and has bubbly handwriting too.”

“No that was me. I like ‘em a little butcher.” 

She was definitely being flirted with. Something on her face must have shown her confusion because Arizona’s face fell a little, “I’m not—you’re gay right?”

Jane couldn’t respond to that one either. It wasn’t something she ever really gave thought to. But her silence was quickly interpreted by Arizona who went from sexy and charming to flustered in a heartbeat.

“I’m so sorry. I just thought. Well I don’t know. And now you’re you and I’m me and straight girls aren’t my thing. Well I mean, they were. High school was all about turning straight girls. But now I respect them. I respect you and—“

Jane reached out and grabbed one of the wildly gesturing hands, “Arizona,” she said, “I like people.”

Arizona stared.

“Okay but what does that mean?”

“That means,” this was about to be the bravest moment of Jane’s life. Braver then telling her mom she was moving out and braver then taking on a 250 pound perp. “This is a date.”

“Then ignore everything I just said.”

“Including the part about turning straight girls.”

“I was a military brat. I was always moving before I could really build a reputation as a lesbian slut at any one school.”

“I’ll have to remember that.”

The conversation turned to less dangerous territory as they talked about their childhoods and their work. They studiously avoided the sexuality conversation and Jane kept having to pinch herself to remind herself that she really was on a date with a gorgeous woman surgeon who was totally into her.

As they were getting up to leave and Jane tried to figure out whether she should escort Arizona somewhere and kiss her or just grab her coat and leave and pray for a phone call Arizona’s beeper went off.

She pulled the bulky black box off the waist of her jeans and stared at the number.

“Problem,” Jane asked.

“Yeah, the hospital’s ringing me about Jane Doe.”

So…no after date kissing then.

  


####

The first question Callie had, after processing the image of her fully dressed wife passed out on top of the duvet, was why was there a woman sleeping in the bed in Sofia’s room?

Amendment: Why was **Arizona’s ex** sleeping in the bed in Sofia’s room?

Her wife was still dead to the world and thus useless for answering such questions. The ex seemed just as bad off. So Callie tried to quiet the question by making a big breakfast. Coffee. Chorizo and eggs. She even threw some tortillas in the microwave. 

The smell of breakfast brought Arizona out. She was half dressed now, in a bra and her jeans and if Callie didn’t have the image of the passed out ex in her head she might have relished the site of her half naked wife. “Why are you making fancy breakfast?”

“For our guest!” She hoped she sounded bright and cheery and positively bitchy. She hoped her tone terrified her wife and sent a chill through her bones.

Arizona scratched at a bare patch of skin on her shoulder, “That’s a lot of eggs.”

She then maneuvered around Callie and poured herself a cup of coffee, which she drank with noisy relish.

It took Callie a moment to realize Arizona wasn’t going to address the Bostonian elephant in the other room. She served up the eggs on a plate. “Does out guest not like eggs?”

“She likes them just fine. Though not usually with all the chorizo.”

“Will it be too spicy for her?” Callie’s words were perfectly enunciated, her irritation driving her to pronounce things exactly.

“Eh. She’ll get over it.”

“Anything else she can get over?”

Arizona took another sip and watched her wife over the edge of her mug.

“Am I missing something?”

“I know I haven’t been in the lezzie game as long as you. I don’t have a gold star and until we started dating I’d never even used a dental dam but I’m not an idiot.”

Now Arizona was giving Callie her sexy smile, which when combined with her in nothing but a bra and jeans set Callie’s pants of fire—no! She must be resolved.

“She’s your ex? Right? All the body language last night was Arizona code for ‘oh look my ex is picking me up in a bar in front of the wife’ correct?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Not the thing to say to the lady with the spatula Arizona.” She shook it at her for good measure and a fleck of browned chorizo flew off and hit the floor.

“Well it—“

“Baby and baby daddy in the house!”

Mark, being the most inconvenient best friend Callie had ever known, took that moment to burst into the room. Where he promptly saw half naked Arizona and held up Sofia in front of him as a defense. “Woah mommy boobs! Put those away!”

“Shut it Mark.”

“I’m not the one waving mammaries about.”

“Mammaries, really,” Callie asked, distracted from very important conversations by the image of Mark using their child as a visual shield and throwing out big words.

“They’re gay and I’m not allowed to play with them so they’re mammaries. Making them scientific means I’m less likely to look.”

Callie couldn’t fault her baby daddy’s logic.

“Now would you put them away? Sofia’s rear is dangerously close to my nose and if she drops a load I’ll probably be killed.”

Arizona held her hands up in supplication and went back into the bedroom, shutting the door loudly on her way. Mark set Sofia down in her play pen and looked over his shoulder at Callie who was now adding a can of refried beans to the hot skillet.

“Fancy breakfast and naked Arizona?”

“Not as awesome as you think.”

Before he could ask why his two best friends were apparently irritated the answer slunk out into the room.

As Callie was sober and the other woman was now lit less by the neon lights of the bar and more by the bright sun Callie could get a proper look at her. And it was a terrible view. The woman was gorgeous—built like a model—she was making a wrinkled pair of pants and a button down shirt look delicious. Even the righteous case of bed head looked good. Her dark brown hair was all wavy and curly and unruly and a less faithful Callie was picturing that woman in a skin tight wet suit on the beach with surf board in hand.

By the slack jaw state of Mark’s mouth Callie suspected he was also seeing visions of the ex on a beach, only in a bikini, or, more likely, stark naked.

“Hi,” she said.

Callie and Mark shared a look. Sweet Lord that woman’s voice. It was enough to melt both of them. 

But as only the unnaturally pretty can be the woman was oblivious to her effect on them. She stuck her hand up and sort of waved. Then directed her attention to Callie. “I hope it’s okay,” she said, “I haven’t got a hotel yet and Arizona offered your,” she glanced over to the play pen where Sofia was drooling on herself and staring at the ceiling, “nursery.”

“No! It’s great. I never get to meet any of Arizona’s old friends.”

Callie had no idea why she said friend. Why she didn’t call the woman out as an ex and wag her ring in front of the woman’s face. She had all sorts of rights in that regard. Though Arizona had never really done that to Callie’s exes, and she’d had to deal first hand with a lot of them. A lot a lot of them.

Then the ex had to go and smirk. “She said I was an old friend?”

Arizona took that moment to burst back into the room and judging by the way she flung the bedroom door open and fell out she’d probably been racing to get there.

“Jane! You’re awake!”

So the ex had a name. She suspected she’d heard it last night but bars, alcohol and jealousy weren’t really conducive to listening. ‘Jane’ looked from Callie to Arizona and back.

“I am. I was just talking to your—“

“Wife.”

Oh way to go Callie. Just pee on her leg.

Mark, sensing he and Sofia had stumbled into a war zone stepped up and stuck out his hand. “Hi, Mark Sloan. Surgeon god, best friend and father to the adorable baby over there.”

The woman tagged him with a megawatt smile—no doubt grateful for intervention—and accepted the offered hand. “Jane Rizzoli. Boston PD.”

She said it in entirely officious way, like she probably did when introducing herself to a bereaved widow.

Mark pressed, “So you’re in town for a visit?”

She glanced over at Arizona who was now tugging on her hiking boots that she wore almost never because she said they made her look butch.

“Business actually. But I hadn’t seen Arizona in a while and thought we’d catch up.”

He leaned in, “Long way to catch up for a friend.” Somehow he managed to say it as lasciviously as possible while also making it a vague threat.

Arizona finished her laces and stood up. “I think Jane and I are going to go for a walk before work. Maybe grab donuts. Anyone want donuts?”

Callie poured the beans she’d been heating into neat servings on a row of plates she’d pulled from the dishwasher. “How about instead we all sit down and have this lovely meal I just made especially for our **guest**.”

If her wife had had a tail it would have been between her legs.

#

They’d made it through an incredibly uncomfortable breakfast where Callie made snide comments, Jane tried to ignore it all and Arizona kept trying to change the subject and avoid talking about the ex-fiancee sitting at the breakfast bar with them.

The other guy, Mark, he watched it all like it was a particularly rousing game of beach volleyball.

Afterwards Arizona had hopped up, kissed her wife on the cheek and dragged Jane out of the apartment. They’d then proceeded to walk around in silence for the better part of an hour as Arizona seemed to process the last twelve hours.

“I think,” Jane pondered, “your wife hates me.”

Arizona was wearing a bright blue all weather coat with the name Seattle Grace Mercy West emblazoned on the breast. She had the hood flipped up to cover her head despite things being dry for the first time in an hour, and she was kicking at the pavement while she walked. With the huge coat and the big hiking boots she looked every inch a child.

“She doesn’t hate you. She just doesn’t know you.”

“I picked up on that. I take it she doesn’t know about the engagement?”

“Oh no. Not even a little. If she knew I’d been engaged…”

“So you’re just going to lie.”

“I’m going to obfuscate. I’m very good at it.”

“As I recall.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“About your wife hating me?”

“About Gregg skipping out on his parole.”

Jane had given it quite a bit of thought to that question over the last twenty-four hours. The fact that Gregg was out and had disappeared meant he was plotting, because that’s what he was best at.

“I’m going to see if I can find him before he finds you.”

Arizona gave her a dark look, “You really think he’s out here looking for me?“

“He went AWOL almost as soon as he was out of prison. I think it’s an option we should explore.”

“I have a kid Jane. A wife. We’re not twentysomethings who can just—“

“Run around town playing detective?”

“Pretty much yeah.”

“Fortunately for you I am an actual detective. And a good one. I’ll get in touch with Seattle PD and we’ll work this case.”

“And me?”

“You go to work. Appease the irate wife. Live you life.”

The idea that she wouldn’t be wrapped up in the hunt quickly settled Arizona’s frayed nerves. She nodded, “Yeah. I can do that. But if something comes up. Whatever. Even if it’s just a plane ticket saying he headed to Fiji or something. I know about it.”

It was a tone that brooked no argument. One Jane was unfamiliar with having directed at herself.

Arizona had one of the most authoritative men Jane had ever met for a father, and maybe because of it she’d always been a little reluctant to wield her own authority. At least with Jane. When she’d gotten Chief Resident at Mass Gen she’d had no problem whipping her fellow surgeons into shape. Jane loved to go meet up with her for dinner where they’d sit in her tiny office and eat pasta and watch young surgery residents squirm under some very intense gazes Arizona would hand out.

“Man, I would hate to work for you,” she once said over a plate of lasagna.

Arizona had looked up in surprise, “What? Why? I’m awesome.”

“Yeah awesomely scary. You just had that woman near tears!”

Arizona had waved her fork dismissively at that, “Eh she’s just a first year. She’ll get over it.”

But Arizona never spoke that way to Jane. Never showed her the steel of a Marine’s daughter like that. It was almost…nice to see her be so authoritative even though she was choosing a particularly stupid battle to fight.

Jane held her hands up in supplication, “My investigation is an open book to you.”

“Good. We should probably head back. I’ve got a PDA repair I have to do without the Cardio attending finding out and horning in on it.”

“That sounds like a lot of fun. If I’d understood 90% of what you just said I would have been excited.”

Arizona bumped her shoulder into Jane’s playfully, “We dated for five years and you immediately took up being BFFs with a super smart doctor and you don’t know the lingo?”

“I was too busy filling my head with useful facts like the way arterial blood splatters on walls.”

Arizona stopped walking and wrinkled her nose in disgust, “And that’s a little gross.”

#

Somewhere on their walk back Arizona found herself asking Jane to stay at the apartment while she was in town. It was a logical course of action. Jane owned a gun, regularly dealt with bad guys and would be great protection if Gregg came knocking.

Only Callie had no idea about Gregg and probably wouldn’t be okay with Arizona’s ex staying with them. But it wasn’t like Callie could get **that** mad. They were raising a child with her former sex friend. I guy who once proposed marriage!

She wasn’t sure how she could spin Jane staying with them as a good thing without throwing Mark in Callie’s face, but she was determined to try.

And just as determined to not mention Gregg. That was a part of her life she’d buried. Something she never, ever, **ever** wanted to relive. Something she couldn’t conceivably recount to Callie and certainly not without explaining Jane’s involvement and thoroughly unravelling the web of half truths Arizona had built up around a five year portion of her life.

When she slipped into the hospital after giving a spare key to Jane and showing her where the car was parked she was relieved to see Callie’s name on the board. Seeing the procedure she did the math—five hours. Five whole hours where she could figure out **what** to say and five whole hours were she wouldn’t have to actually say anything.

She changed into her scrubs and switched out her clodhoppers for her trainers and was almost out of the attendings’ changing room when Teddy and Cristina magically appeared like scalpel hungry elves.

The scream she let out was somewhere between a yelp, a scream and a hiccup. Cristina raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment. Teddy ignored it and held up a chart.

“A PDA?”

“On a peds patient.”

“A PDA should have a cardio consult.”

“I think I’m okay?”

She squeezed past the pair and tried to figure out how fast she’d have to run to beat them to the elevator. Teddy was scary fast and Cristina was superhuman when heart surgeries were on the line.

“Yang or I should assist.”

“You’re telling me there isn’t a single old person with a clogged heart that needs cutting?”

“No.”

She snatched the chart away from Teddy and picked up the pace towards the elevator. “I’m sorry Teddy, I really am, but Karev is assisting on this PDA.”

Teddy came to a full stop, “Okay, so let’s talk about last night. Cute girlfriend.”

Arizona spun on her heel. “Would you—she’s not my girlfriend.”

“But she was right? Does Callie know?”

Arizona was suddenly acutely aware of the fact that Cristina was standing right there. Cristina who she wasn’t crazy about but who apparently counted as a close friend to Callie and was even the godmother of her child. Cristina who would have no qualms about telling Callie whatever she heard here, and who was trying to seem disinterested but was probably actually **quite** curious.

“She’s an ex. She’s in town consulting on a case and she’s staying with us because she’s too poor to afford a hotel room for two weeks. That’s it.”

Teddy took the chart back, “And you ditched your widowed friend you were trying to cheer up to have drinks with her.”

“You’re guilting your way onto this surgery aren’t you?”

“Yup!”

“Mean.”

She was kind of proud of her actually.


	3. Chapter 3

Part of police work was intuition. Sometimes you just had to **know** the right course of action. When to shoot. When to run. When to back away. But a bigger part of police work was logic. Taking avenues of reason to their logical conclusion. Following trails and asking simple questions.

Jane’s first order of business once Arizona left was to look up the closet police department. It was closer than she’d thought so she walked there on foot. The greeting was…less than civil. Cops were a territorial bunch. It was why most of them hated the FBI and other ABC governmental agencies. But a cop out of their jurisdiction was the absolute worst.

They sneered and dragged feet and finally a good looking guy who identified himself as Detective Williams came and spoke to her. She showed him the file. Pictures of the assault. History. He asked some questions she’d gotten tired of answering eight years ago.

“I think we have everything we need,” he said.

“What’s your plan now?”

“Keep an eye out for him.”

“That’s it?”

“We’ll put a car on her house for a few days. But really we have no proof he’s coming all the way to Seattle. And even if he does you guys couldn’t find her. What makes you think he will?”

She felt the look she gave him was enough to convey her sense of horror at his handling of the case.

“You’re better off contacting the Feds.”

That would raise a few heads. Gabe would get involved. He’d ask questions. Things would quickly get messy.

“Thanks. I’ll give ‘em a call.” She gathered her file and started to leave.

“Hey,” he called after her, “stay out of trouble while you’re in town. Will ya?” 

Man she hated trying to solve crimes in other cities. “Absolutely.”

She stopped and bought a coffee on her way back to the apartment because everyone was always telling her Seattle coffee was the best, but it only tasted like regular old coffee and the guy that gave it to her was wearing a beanie on his head despite it being close to 80 degrees in the cafe.

Things she knew. Hamilton Gregg was out. He shared a fairly equal hatred of both she and Arizona because they were responsible for getting him arrested in the first place. He disappeared almost immediately after release. Despite combing the city of Boston there was no sign of him. 

So what was he doing? What had he been doing in prison while she and Arizona built a life and then destroyed it and started all over again? She needed more information.

  


####

Purposely distancing herself from Jane at work meant that Maura had also ended up distancing herself from other coworkers. She’d accepted this as fact when she made the decision. They were good friends, but they were, first and foremost, Jane’s friends. It became easy to only speak with Korsak or Frost when they came down to ask specific questions about a case. It had felt…almost normal.

But this was Korsak’s first visit to her office since Jane had evacuated the state to rescue an old girlfriend. A turn of events that Maura could honestly admit she had never anticipated.

Jane had always struck her as being thoroughly heterosexual. Yes, she’d caught her staring at her breasts before, but Maura had exceptional breasts and every time she’d caught her staring Maura had been wearing something meant to accentuate her exceptional breasts. Any heterosexual woman would stare. Many had.

Jane also only sought out men to date. She only spoke of former boyfriends. Her family also only referred to her as straight.

Which meant, logically, that either she was straight, or she was “in the closet.”

She wondered what Korsak knew. He’d been her partner for years. Did he know she’d had a secret long term love affair with another woman? Did he know who she was? Why she moved to a dismal place like Seattle? It didn’t have many standout industries. 

Computer software development was a major industry there. Perhaps this girlfriend was a programmer? Or a UI designer? Maybe she managed the back end of large websites. Only Jane mocked all of Maura’s geekier tendencies. She would never date a geek and any one in the software development industry was likely a geek. It was an insular community.

A top ranking hospital was there too. She’d briefly considered doing her residency there—then she realized she didn’t actually like surgery and much preferred the company of the dead. But Jane always acted surprised about Maura’s extensive medical knowledge and she certainly didn’t seem the type to date a doctor. She thought doctors were weird. She always made odd faces when Maura dated them.

Perhaps…a ship captain? Boston and Seattle were both homes to major international shipping ports. Only…well really why was she even thinking this woman moved there for a job in a major industry that was highly competitive in Seattle. Perhaps she was a barista or an artist or musician and “followed her heart.”

The amount of her mental faculties she was committing to the question must have finally shown on her face because Korsak stopped talking about the case. “Doc you okay?”

“Yes. I’m fine.”

He frowned and stared. “She told you didn’t she.” The man was amazingly astute.

“Did you know? About her…friend?”

“I was there when they met.”

“Really?” Now she wanted to ask questions. How had they met? How long did they know one another? What did she do? What was she like? How could he have known this major fact about Jane’s life and never divulged it?

“It was on a case. Actually the Hamilton Gregg case. She was the doctor working on all the girls we found.”

“She’s a doctor?”

If she’d been working on children that meant emergency medicine or pediatrics. Possibly surgery though that was unlikely. They were all competitive fields. Especially in Boston. Less so in Seattle unless she went to Richard Webber’s hospital. It fluctuated in the rankings but still was considered one of the best hospitals in the nation with excellence in neurosurgery, plastic surgery and pediatric surgery. 

“Yeah. Cute girl. But it wasn’t going to work out.”

“Because Jane is straight?”

He looked at her oddly, “No, they were together for five years but they were both workaholics. Really I think they just stuck together because of the Gregg case. When something that intense happens to you at the beginning of a relationship you kind of owe it to yourself to see it through. You know?”

Maura did not know. She wasn’t especially sure what he was talking about. She was also intensely curious about the Gregg case. 

“You don’t know anything about the Gregg case do you?”

“It was before my time.”

He sighed and then wrote something down on the pad in front of her. “Use this to look it up. If anyone asks how you got it I’ll lie.”

“Thank you.”

“And call her?”

That was a step too far. She did not feel it necessary to tell him he’d taken a liberty though. She preferred narrowing her eyes. He immediately understood the emotion she was attempting to convey.

“Sorry,” he said.

  


####

As soon as Mark’s ass was in the seat he knew he’d made a poor choice. Usually lunch with the mothers of his child was a flirty affair. In that they’d flirt with each other and he’d watch and wish his girlfriend worked at the same hospital they worked at.

But today Callie was by herself and looked placid enough from afar. It was when he sat down that the problem started. She scowled. 

“Yikes, what’s with you.”

“The ex girlfriend in our apartment.”

He took a bit of his salad and then tried to speak around all the lettuce and dressing in his mouth, “She already left didn’t she.”

“No. She’s staying.”

“For how long?”

“Don’t ask me. She and Arizona have a ‘project’ they have to work on.”

He mimicked her air quotes, “Is ‘project’ code for an affair?”

She deflated. “No. Arizona wouldn’t cheat.”

“So what’s the problem.”

“It’s her ex.”

“You realize you’re raising a child with your former sex buddy right? You and I aren’t really allowed to be jealous of purely platonic friendships with exes.”

Callie sighed and rested her head in her hands. Then she started up with the pouting, “But it suuuuucks.”

“Suck it up Torres! Be a woman about it.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Be super nice but make it clear that if she sticks around too long you’ll kick her ass.”

“It’s just…”

Woah. Something about this thing with the ex was really hitting Callie hard. She wasn’t just jealous. She was worried. “Callie?”

“She bailed on us Mark. We were at Joe’s having fun and she just bailed.”

He put his fork down and scooted closer so he could lean in and ask softly, “Do you really think she’s going to bail again? Over some ex she never talks about?”

“No, but…I thought she never mentioned her because she doesn’t care. What if it’s really because she **does** care?”

“Then you ask her.”

She looked terrified, “And what if she says yes?”

  


#####

“Rizzoli,” she mumbled into the phone.

She then had to squint to read the clock which said it was the ungodly hour of ten in the morning. She’d only been asleep for four or five hours and she wanted a few more before getting up and making a brave attempt to face the day.

“Did I wake you up?”

It was Dr. Robbins. Jane immediately sat up and tried to tamp down the smile she could feel on her face.

“No,” she said huskily. 

“I did. Sorry. I got your note earlier and was going to see if you wanted to give me my credit card back in exchange for breakfast.”

What had—Arizona had left her card with Jane when she rushed back over to the hospital, and Jane had in turn left a flirty note with her address and phone number on it telling Arizona she’d have to work to get it back.

She just didn’t think she’d be trying at 10 a.m.

“I…” Jane rubbed at some sleep in her eye and tried to get her bearings, “I can do breakfast?”

“Good,” it sounded like Arizona had just stepped in from the wind outside. A door shut and she heard Arizona walking up some stairs. “I went ahead and got donuts and coffee and I’m about—two flights of stairs away from your door.”

“Then I should probably put on pants huh.”

“Well you don’t **have** to. I won’t complain.”

“I’ll see you in a minute.”

She snapped her phone close and threw the covers off. Pants. Where were the pants? Everything on the floor was dirty and the only stuff in her closet were work pants but--ah ha! There was a pair of workout pants hanging out of her dresser. She yanked them out and pulled them on and prayed they were as clean as they looked. Running to the bathroom she didn't detect any funky odor but she sprayed just a touch of perfume and ran through it just in case.

In the mirror she looked haggard and like she’d worked a long shift and hadn’t slept. She washed her face, gargled some mouthwash, and briefly agonized over whether throwing on a little eye make up would be weird.

Before she could decide Dr. Robbins was at her door knocking. Only when Jane opened the door Arizona looked completely gutted.

Jane shifted uncomfortably.

“Tell me you were lying about just waking up. Please.”

She looked down at what she was wearing. Was it that bad?

“Because if this is what you look like fresh out of bed than I’m in serious trouble.” 

“Are you always so smooth after a night without sleep?”

Arizona smiled, “Usually smoother. But I’m busy staring at you. How are you legal?”

And now it was starting to get uncomfortable. Arizona was looking at her like she was…meat or something.

The surgeon shook her head and held up a bag, “Donuts?”

Jane stepped aside to let her in. “Oh you’re definitely one of those kind of women.”

"I've got to compete with every straight guy and the entire cast of the L Word. I've got to be smooth and sexy. And I really really like pastries. They're kind of my favorite thing in the world."

Over donuts they briefly talked about the girls.

"What happened?"

"Her stats dropped but we got them back up. Then your man Korsak came in and asked us to wake her up."

"Did you?"

She nodded and took a big bite of a chocolate glazed donut, "We did. She told us about a pit in the woods. Said she climbed out."

"That would make sense."

"Yeah. The other girls all had dirt caked under their nails too. But they would have been way too weak to climb out of a pit. She should have been too."

"You think she’s lying?"

She shook her head, "I don't know what to think honestly. None of it makes sense. I guess,” she put her donut down, “kids are resilient you know? You or I in that situation? We wouldn’t have been able to gather the energy to escape, but she did.”

“And so did the others. Unless whoever is taking them is then letting them out—watching them run.”

Arizona shuttered, “That’s too creepy to think about.”

  


####

The case files regarding Hamilton Gregg were surprisingly sparse. He’d gone to jail for violently assaulting Arizona Robbins, a name that was frustratingly familiar to Maura. Before that he’d been filing for a restraining order against Jane. Which was just, well, it was absurd. Jane wasn’t the sort of person one filed a restraining order against.

Robbins must have been the girlfriend that Jane was seeking out in Seattle. And she could understand how something like a violent assault would bring two people together. The closest she’d ever felt to Jane was after Hoyt had attacked them in that prison infirmary. She’d never wanted to leave Jane’s side after that.

But Maura kept thinking back to the look on Jane’s face in her back yard. The sense of urgency she’d imparted with her words. She’d acted like Gregg was a very real and present threat to this woman when nothing in the file indicated that. In fact, it almost looked like she and Robbins had trapped him, lured him into the assault.

Which also didn’t make sense. If that was the case Jane wouldn’t still be working as a cop. She debated calling Korsak or knocking on Angela’s door and asking her more about the case and the woman, but then she got a very silly idea.

Jane had a tendency to be a workaholic. She often brought her work home and looked over case files while lounging on her couch and eating a bowl of overly sweet cereal. There was a chance, a very good chance, that she’d have some sort of personal, Jane file on the Gregg case. Something that would illuminate all the mysteries currently presented to Maura.

The more she thought about it, the more it became clear, she was going to have to go to Jane’s apartment and snoop through her things. It made absolute sense. It would answer her questions. It would also help her avoid questions from Angela and Korsak. Both of whom would both wonder why she cared so much. After all, wasn’t she avoiding Jane? Wasn’t she furious about what had happened to her father?

Why then, did she care?

  


####

A Seahawk came in with a spinal injury and Arizona ended up picking Sofia up from the daycare alone. Grey was there getting Zola ready to head home and she nodded.

"Callie stuck in that surgery with Derek?"

"Looks that way." She smiled at Zola who was smacking her chubby little fists against the play table she and Sofia sat at. Jutting her chin in their direction she noted, "They're getting along."

Grey agreed, "Yeah. I think Derek and Mark are doing play dates in here daily. Caught Zola asking for her uncle yesterday."

“Oh. We should, ah, I guess we should all get together at some point then huh? If the girls are going to be friends?"

This was indeterminately awkward. Arizona was fairly certain she'd never had a conversation lasting longer than half a minute with the other surgeon. They were always in each other peripherals. Sharing many friends but not being friends themselves. Callie had even mentioned it when she started helping Grey study for her boards.

Grey looked uncomfortable and nodded. "A play date would be fun."

"Good." Be perky Arizona, it will mask your discomfort.

"Good." Grey frowned. "There's a strange woman looking at us wistfully."

What? Arizona followed Grey's gaze and saw Jane standing on the other side of the glass and looking sheepish.

"Do you know her," Meredith asked.

"She's an ex."

"Is she...stalking you?"

"Just visiting Seattle.”

She scooped her daughter up and stepped out into the hallway. 

"Hey," she said in a low voice. "Is everything okay?"

"Sorry. I got bored sitting in your apartment. Came over here and someone pointed me down here."

"Oh."

“Why is that woman in there giving me the stink eye?”

“That’s Grey. She gives everyone she doesn’t know the stink eye.”

Putting her daughter on her hip she took Jane by the arm and guided her away from the daycare.

“Have any luck with your investigation?”

“I learned Seattle has sucky coffee served by guys in beanies.”

“Right.”

“And that Gregg had no friends on the inside but did have a number of pen pals.”

“Ew. Seriously?”

“Some women find perverted scumbags sexy I guess. I asked Korsak, back in Boston? To see what he can find on the women.”

“So we’re hoping Gregg skipped bail to have a rendezvous?”

Jane shrugged, “Kind of unnerving, but yeah.”

They stepped onto the elevator and Jane hit the button to go up. The doors were nearly closed when a hand snaked in between them and they opened again. Grey was a little frazzled on the other side.

“Sorry,” she said, and stepped in with her daughter on her hip. Sofia and Zola both wriggled in their mothers’ arms to play with one another and Arizona watched with amusement. She looked up to remark on it to Grey but noticed Grey’s attention was elsewhere.

Specifically on Arizona’s hand.

Because she was definitely still holding Jane’s arm in the elevator like a complete idiot. She left go as if the other woman were fire but the damage was done, Grey was watching her like a hawk. Jane, on the other side of her, was oblivious.

“You know what we should do while I’m here,” Jane said, “we should go to the parks. I always here stuff about that one park in Seattle.”

“Kerry Park,” Grey offered, still eyeing Arizona suspiciously. “Great view of the Needle. Very romantic.” 

  


####

It was awkward. Awkward like the first time they talked about having babies awkward. Arizona was evasive and Callie was stewing and there was a leggy brunette softly snoring in Sofia’s room. And Callie couldn’t stand it. She hated not talking. She hated avoiding issues and burying her concerns. It drove her up the wall, while her wife, her wife was an expert at avoiding issues and necessary conversations. 

And she was currently in the shower doing a good job avoiding Callie. She’d been in there ten minutes. That was usually the maximum amount of shower time for Arizona. All those years on bases and raised by a Marine had turned her into a very efficient water user. Except when they were enjoying showers together—or when she was upset. For some reason she often sought solitude in the shower.

No, not today.

Callie cracked the door open and looked in. Steam was billowing out over the glass and had fogged up the shower walls giving her only a tantalizing tanned silhouette to look at. Stepping all the way in she softly shut the door behind her.

“Callie?”

“Hey.”

She debated on stripping and joining her wife, but what she really wanted to do was talk to her, so she took a seat on the toilet and waited. Arizona was standing perfectly still. She wasn’t soaping up or rinsing off, she was just standing beneath a spray of water so hot it’d brought the temperature of the whole bathroom up a few degrees.

“Are you…”

“Just thought I’d sit here.”

Arizona seemed confused by that. She watched her start to pace and then stop herself. Then she reached for the shampoo. “She won’t be staying all that long.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Okay, I do, but we both know that’s not the issue.”

She worked the shampoo into her hair. Callie had done that from time to time. Washed Arizona’s hair. She always marveled at how the blond hair seemed to shimmer in the water. Her’s only turned dark.

“Okay.”

“You dated her.”

Arizona sighed, loud enough to be heard of the running water, “I thought we agreed not to talk about exes.”

“That was before one started sleeping on our couch.”

“Callie…”

She stood up. Came close to the glass. Close enough to see her wife more clearly through the fog. “She’s not like the others. I know you want me to think she is. I know you want me to think she’s like all the derm and path girls and that nurse on the third floor. Like Colleen, but she isn’t. You don’t even acknowledge them, but her?”

Jane Rizzoli was enough to get Arizona to abandon her wife in a crowded bar. Jane Rizzoli was enough to cause a fight between them. Jane Rizzoli shook her wife to her very core. Something that no one, living or dead, ever seemed to do. She was special.

“I feel like you’re running and I can’t figure out who from,” she whispered.

The water shut off and Arizona opened the shower door and stared at her. She looked…sad. Impossibly sad. Almost imperceptibly she shook her head. No. “Stop,” she seemed to say. “Stop thinking. Stop feeling. Just stop Callie.” But she was quiet. A statue. Aphrodite crafted from stone and the sea and placed in her life to enchant her and devastate her with her perfection. Water dripped off of her. Ran rivulets down her naked breasts and thighs. She shook her head again, more fiercely this time and stepped close.

A goddess set on earth and destined to destroy every part of Callie’s self.

She stepped back. Her hands rising to form a barrier between her and her wife.

“You ran,” she heard herself say, her voice close to cracking. She’d meant to sound flippant but had been shattered by a look. She was as bare as her wife. Split open by her gaze.

“I’m here.” Her chest was red from the heat of the shower. A blush spread across her breasts that left the rest of her untouched.

“But last night—“ Arizona ignored Callie’s body language. Ignored her questions and concerns. She slammed into her wife. Her lips crashed against Callie’s her mouth. “Stop,” she said against her lips, voicing the words her eyes had spoken. Her hands were holding Callie in place—wrapped around her waist securely— and her body was soaking through Callie’s thin pajamas. She pushed her back until Callie’s thighs hit the high edge of the sink. Arizona’s lips traveled, moving in a long hot trail down her body. Her hands tugged at Callie’s shirt. “Stop,” she murmured against her belly.

Callie leaned against the sink and gasped as Arizona licked and sucked and nibbled her way down . A hand still wet from the shower tugged at her pants and soon Arizona’s mouth was between her legs. Her breath was warm on her inner thigh. “Please stop.” 

She scrambled to keep standing as Arizona’s built her up and shattered her all over again.

And some small part of her realized that she wasn’t reaffirming her love. She was distracting Callie. Distracting her from the woman in the other room. The woman who mattered more than anything now.


	4. Chapter 4

Arizona woke up first. She and Callie were both naked and wrapped up in each other and covered only by a thin sheet. She watched her wife sleep. Marveled at the perfectly sculpted brow and lips like a woman carved of Grecian marble. She was perfect.

And Arizona was not.

She slipped carefully out of bed and quietly dressed. Then she moved past a sleeping Jane, who much like Callie, liked to sleep on her stomach with her arms and legs akimbo. It was endearing until Arizona realized how similar it was.

Her daughter’s room was quiet. Only the low hum of the humidifier. Like her mother she slept on her stomach. But she was a lighter sleeper and when Arizona stepped into the room she opened her eyes groggily. Before she could turn fussy Arizona scooped her up and took a seat in the rocking chair.

She was content there, wrapped up in her daughter and with her former lover and her current one both out of sight. Sofia was a soothing presence. A way to steal away the ache and angst and all the troubled little thoughts. 

When Sofia had settled a little in her arms she carefully put her back in her crib. Sofia immediately pulled herself up to stand and watched Arizona as she opened the closet door. It wasn’t on the top shelf where removing something might dislodge it and scatter its contents to the ground. The box was sitting beneath her suitcase. With a little effort she got it out without disturbing the rest of the closet and sat down next to her daughter’s crib to look at it. Sofia sat with her and reached through the bars to play with Arizona’s hair and watch her actions thoughtfully.

The box was full of mementos. Photographs and little keepsakes. Things she couldn’t quite bring herself to part with but things she rarely wanted to look at. The photo on the top of the stack was one of her and Jane on their fourth anniversary. They’d gone to a Red Sox game and both had dopey hats and dopier grins on their faces.

It was the photos underneath though. One of Jane and Timothy sitting on Arizona on their couch in their old place back in Boston. She could only see a little bit of her smile and a foot peaking out from beneath them.

They’d been together more than four years when they got the news that Tim had been killed. They’d been planning the wedding. He was going to be her maid of honor and he’d threatened to wear a ball gown. Angela had insisted that cross dressing would only happen over her dead body and he could wear a morning coat like Jane’s brother.

That was when it all fell apart. They had to postpone things. Wait a while. But they never got it back. **She** never got it back. The woman she’d been with Jane disappeared as soon as they handed her mother that stupid folded up flag.

She’d rebuilt herself. Slowly. Surely. She finished her fellowship and moved to Seattle and dabbled with nurses and doctors outside her own department. Then she’d seen Calliope. And she’d looked as sad as Arizona felt. Kissing her. It was the first step in fixing everything that had gone wrong. And Callie hadn’t known it—hadn’t realized who she was dating or how she was healing her. But day by day, month by month she put Arizona back together again.

The door to Sofia’s room opened with a quiet click. She looked up and saw Callie watching her in the shadows. “Hey,” she whispered. 

Callie stepped in and carefully closed the door behind her. She looked down at the photos and the box of keepsakes and then back up at her wife. “You were gone.”

“I just needed to clear my head.”

She came closer and opened her mouth to say something. Then stopped. She was looking at the photo in Arizona’s hand. Her face fell and she carefully knelt next to her.

“I didn’t know about these.”

“I usually—I don’t think about them.”

Callie carefully sat beside her and leaned against the crib. She caught their daughter’s arm and gently kissed it before reaching to take the photo Arizona was holding.

“That’s your brother isn’t it?”

Arizona nodded.

“You know you never talk about him?”

“I know.”

“I’ve never even seen a picture. I mean, except those baby pictures your mom has.”

“A Robbins doesn’t linger on the past,” she said. Half proudly and half conciliatorily.

“He looks like you.”

“We were twins.”

And there it was. That look of pity. She never talked about her brother. Ever. She avoided mentioning him. Couldn’t stand to think about him because then she’d remember he was gone and it would feel like her insides were being clawed out. And Callie had always been good about it. She never pressed it. She was patient and understanding and for a woman who talked about everything she never talked about him.

So she’d never told her things. Never told her how they were born scant minutes apart and how they went through school together and how they were kind of sickly kids who spent all their time in the hospital. How they got older and became successes. How he followed their father and how she blazed new roads and became a doctor. How they talked every day that they could.

Jane knew all that though. Unlike Callie she didn’t have to be told. She didn’t have to infer. She’d been there when he was and she’d been there when he was gone. And she got that. Something her wife never could.

Callie didn’t know what to say. She reached out and held Arizona’s hand and seemed to struggle with it all. She set the photo back in Arizona’s lap. “She’s always going to have that isn’t she? The part of you that was with him? I’ll love you my whole life, but she’ll get that piece of you.”

She opened her mouth to tell her. To tell her about the aborted wedding and about how Jane had tried so hard to fix her. How she owed Jane. Owed her a debt that she couldn’t even conceive of repaying.

But the words hung in her throat.

  


####

Breaking into Jane’s apartment was a misnomer. It suggested she had to wear all black and carry a crowbar and possibly actually break something. Instead Maura drove over and used her key. She hadn’t given it back yet.

The apartment was dark, and although Jane had only been gone two days it already had that stale smell of a house unlived in. Everything was dark and still and seemed odd even when she turned the lights on.

It was much like it had been when Jane had spent a month in the hospital after the shooting. Maura had come over often then. To see that mail was picked up and that dust didn’t accumulate. It had been…unnerving. Like moving through the house of the dead—despite Jane being very much alive.

A chill went through her and she steeled herself mentally for the job ahead. She needed to find information. Not on whatever dalliances Jane had had in the past. The girlfriend. That was private. There was a reason she’d never told Maura about it. No, it was this man, Gregg, that concerned her.

She started in the closet closest to the door. It was Jane’s catchall closet. A cluttered mess that threatened to explode its contents all over the room any time you opened it. Jane was always intensely amused by Maura’s disgust at the sight of it.

That evening it was a merciful wasteland of old shoes, outdated coats and old boxes. But there was one old box in particular. A moving box that had seen better day. The tape that held it together was yellowed and frayed and it look like it had been caught in the rain once or twice. 

Though she abhorred the idea of pursuing a route of investigation because of “feelings,” she did so anyways. The box opened with a crackle and inside were scattered and stiff papers. Maps. Yellowed newspapers. Police and coroner reports printed on cheap fax paper and faded nearly beyond readability. The map is what drew her attention. It was a detailed one of Riverway park and as she stared at it she realized the marks on it weren’t idle doodles by a bored young policewoman. They were a search grid. An amazingly detailed one.

  


####

Arizona was lounging on Jane’s couch and looked perfectly relaxed. Her giant computer was resting on her legs and doubling as a leg warmer. To help further ward off the chill that seemed to perpetually seep into Jane’s apartment she’d poured herself a cup of coffee and was drinking it with relish.

“Hey,” she said, “how’d the meeting with Korsak go?”

“He told me to keep my day job.”

Arizona frowned and patted the empty cushion beside her. “It was a good idea,” she said.

“I know.” She took the offered seat and laid her head on Arizona’s shoulder. “What are you working on?”

It looked like some kind of spreadsheet with lots of numbers and random letters. “I…” Arizona hesitated and Jane looked up at her. “I’ve been trying to figure out how far the girls ran.”

“What—how?”

She motioned to the gobbledygook on her computer. “So far we only know when one of them disappeared. She’s the only one with anything remotely resembling a timeline. And so I was trying to use what I knew of the other girls’ when they came in to give them timelines too.”

“Isn’t that something the coroner’s office would do?”

Arizona ducked her head, “Yeah. Probably. I just couldn’t—you keep finding them Jane and I keep watching them die.”

Jane chewed on her bottom lip and stared at her girlfriend.

“You think I’m crazy.”

She shook her head and drew the map out of her back pocket. “Actually I’ve been doing the same thing.”

“Is this Riverway?”

She nodded and spread the map out over her lap. “I marked where each girl was found. They’ve searched the park but they all say the girls were dropped there and held elsewhere.”

“But you think they weren’t.”

“I think…it couldn’t hurt to look again.”

Arizona shut her laptop and set it on the floor, “Okay, so when do we go.”

“What—you have work and—“

“And it’s a good idea Jane. I’ll get fresh air and we can check one more idea off our very tiny list.”

Damn it. She loved this woman.

Arizona caught her staring and smiled, “What?”

“You’re kind of the perfect girlfriend aren’t you?”

“Basically.”

  


####

Jane woke up abruptly and Arizona’s wife was sitting on the other couch with their daughter on her lap and a cup of coffee in her hand. She was staring. Which was extremely disconcerting. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and looked towards their bedroom.

“She got paged in around six this morning,” the wife provided.

“Sorry I missed her.”

Callie sipped her coffee and stared.

“I should, probably shower. Start beating the pavement.”

“Because of your case. The one you’re here for?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t think cops had cases in other states.”

“This one is important to me.”

The other woman stood up and carried her daughter into her bedroom. Slowly and methodically Jane dismantled her makeshift bed of pillows and blankets and neatly stacked it up. In the other room the wife cooed to their daughter and then turned on some classical music. Maura would probably know what it was. Probably even recognize who was playing it.

She stooped down to sort through her suitcase and pick out an outfit for the day and when she stood the wife was leaning on the closed door to her daughter’s room.

“Classical music is supposed to be good for kids right?”

“I think Mozart is the only thing that really benefits them, but Arizona likes this piece.”

And listening to it she vaguely recognized the music. The methodical waltz component. Damn it. She’d hung out with Maura too much. And Arizona before her. “Isn’t this from some musical?”

She shrugged, “I think. I’m not really the musical one in the family.”

They both stood still. Listened to the music. It seemed to call to mind all those old crooning guys from the 50s her dad liked to listen too. She half saw him waltzing through the house with her mother on his arm singing it all off key. 

“It’s pretty.”

The wife narrowed her eyes. “I have to say something, and it’s going to seem weird and it’s going to seem rude and wrong and you’ll probably end up telling Arizona about it and she’ll be furious but I have to say it.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t know why you’re here. I don’t know what went on between the two of you. Frankly I don’t want to know. You guys dated and you’re sleeping in my home and that’s way more than enough for me. I trust her. I don’t trust you. But I trust her.”

“You don’t know me.”

“And I don’t need to. I ask her every day to deal with my ex and to raise a child with him and she hates it but she does it, for me. So here, now, I can give some of that back. I can try and be as good as her. So I trust **her**. But you’re bringing something out here. Digging up ghosts. So I hope you won’t make your stay very long.”

“You’re asking me to leave?”

“I’m asking you to keep the past in the past.”

The wife nodded to herself, her piece said, and disappeared back into her own bedroom.

The music continued to play.

  


####

Maura put what she felt was relevant to her investigation in a large envelope she brought with her. Then she replaced the rest of the contents of the box, shut it and left the apartment in the same condition she had found it. Back in her own office she carefully organized and categorized it all.

It was closer to what she did every day. Jane and Korsak were police officers. They had to seek out clues and evidence and interview suspects and understand human nature on a fundamental level that often escaped Maura. What she did—she acquired knowledge. Processed it. Returned a result. The only rules she need apply were those of science and logic.

When presented to her the case Jane had developed was…logical to an extent. It made sense. It just required quite a bit of faith. It wasn’t the sort of case that could be presented in court. It was a mish mash of smart theories, hunches and shreds of very credible evidence.

But somehow it had been enough to raise Hamilton Gregg’s hackles. Somehow it had sent him into a rage and he’d nearly killed her and Arizona Robbins. And if Jane were right—as she often was—then he was a shrewd and cruel man. A sociopath content to watch and control the suffering of others. He understood human nature.

And he rejected it.

As informed as she could be from the documentation Jane had left behind Maura then called Korsak.

“You’re attempting to find him correct?”

He sighed, “Yeah. It isn’t going so well. But we figured out he made a couple of girlfriends in prison. Pen pals.”

Not unusual unfortunately. She’d seen more than one unbalanced woman fall for an unbalanced man in prison. They sought one another out. Honed in on their broken selves and crafted something new and dangerous and often deadly.

“And Jane’s ‘hunch’ about him being in Seattle?”

“Yeah, I just got off the phone with her. Apparently one of these new girlfriends lives about an hour and a half outside of the city.”

“So her hunch is valid.”

“Looks that way.”

  


####

“I could have been a cop.”

“You’re a Marine Tim. You would be a terrible cop. They don’t dress and feed you. You have to do it yourself.”

“Right. But what about her? Is she awesome?”

“Super awesome. Even when she came out to her parents while we were eating.”

“Woah. I thought you gave up dating chicks in the closet.”

“Wait ’til you see a picture of her.”

“Hot.”

“Smokin’. She’s leggy, and a brunette, and she’s got these eyes…”

“You sound like your in love, spaz.”

“I think I am.”

“Dr. Robbins?” The past disappeared in the flick of the eye, stealing her brother away from her and leaving Arizona leaning on her fist in the middle of the ER. Meredith Grey was standing there with a chart. As soon as she had Arizona’s attention she started rattling off the details of a case that had just come in.

“Sounds like appendicitis.”

Grey agreed and led her to the bed where a little boy was having a very bad day. The routine, brightly explaining the simple procedure and easily alleviating the fears of the parents in child, took Arizona’s mind off everything else. Off the bag of worms opened with Jane’s arrival, and her own wife’s disquietude, and the very evil man out there. Somewhere.

Afterwards she handed the chart off to one of the younger residents with instructions to prep an OR and was about to head up to the surgical floor herself when Grey reappeared. “Dr. Robbins? We’ve got a Peds case coming in from Cougar Mountain? Upstairs.”

She quickly worked her course of action in her head. The appendectomy she could do in her sleep and there were any number of 4th and 5th years who could handle it as well. Grey’s urgency and the route via which the case was coming suggested it would likely require more—specialized care.

“Page Karev and have him consult on the appy.”

Grey nodded and Arizona ran for the elevator to the helicopter pad, grabbing a trauma gown and gloves on her way. Just as the door closed Grey stepped in. “He’s on his way,” she said and pulled on her own trauma gown.

Silence.

“So your ex is—“ Damn it. The weird elevator ride the day before was still on Grey’s mind.

“A cop. She’s following up on a case here in Seattle.”

“You dated a cop.”

“Five years.”

She hadn’t meant to say that. It had just sort of come on. Fatigue and worry all colluding to unravel the secrets she’d buried deep down. Grey didn’t say anything though. She had her own secrets and Arizona had found, that of all her colleagues it was her who was least likely to cast judgement. She absorbed information and retained it but she never—

“Callie doesn’t know.”

Grey looked at her in what have been considered a suspicious manner.

“She knows we dated, but not for how long. And I don’t think it matters because she’s who I chose. She’s my wife and Jane, she’s my ex.”

“You should probably just tell her that.” Simple. Pragmatic. But there was just a hint of a rebuke there. Grey was unlikely to wade into her relationship but she didn’t necessarily approve either.

The elevator opened up onto the helipad where Hunt was already waiting and the helicopter was making its decent. As they pulled the girl out she immediately took notice of her injuries. A significant contusion on her head. From a fall the EMT said. She was frail too. Thin. Dehydrated. Starved.

Arizona’s blood turned sluggish in her veins. Like ice coursing through her body. Hunt and Grey were examining the girl as they walked. But Arizona’s eyes were on her fingers. They were scraped. Caked with mud. 

Excluding the head injury she’d seen this. Seen it half a dozen times.

“Robbins!”

Owen was looking at her. Waiting for a response to a question she had not heard.

“We should,” she choked out, “page Shepherd.”

He was here.

“And call the police.”

He was in Seattle. A world away from where she’d left him.

“They’re on their way.”

Call Jane. She looked down at the poor girl. And didn’t fail to notice that his modus operandi had changed. Before the girls had always had brown hair.

This girl’s hair was blond.

Bile rose in her throat. She stepped back from the girl.

“Dr. Robbins?” Grey tried to get her attention. Owen was back to examining the girl. 

Hamilton Gregg was in Seattle. And he’d just sent Arizona a message.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note this stuff is crackalackin’ licious if you are a Grey’s fan. If you’re a R&I fan then there is nothing new here.

She didn’t smoke. When she had to fill out her insurance forms she ticked off the non-smoker box and if she’d ever had to fill out another dating profile she would have noted it there as well. Smoking was a disgusting habit. It was a deadly habit. You couldn’t be a doctor and smoke and expect people to take you seriously after everything out there highlighted just how stupid it was.

But there was a gift shop in the lobby that sold cigarettes and lighters and if you walked out the front entrance and got to the second row of trees lining the walkway you could smoke safely and only get a moderate number of condemning looks.

So that’s what Arizona did. She didn’t especially **want** to smoke, but an inhalation of nicotine, tar and a multitude of toxins was surprisingly comforting. It sated the former smoker and the scent of it recalled happier times when she’d been younger—and an avid chain smoker.

Some people ate. Some people had sex. Arizona smoked for comfort.

And that’s where Jane found her. She immediately frowned. She’d been the one that had encouraged Arizona to quit in the first place and Arizona’s cigarettes had been the cause of more than one fight between the women.

“You’re smoking.”

“Because otherwise I’ll jump out of my own skin.”

“I got your six missed calls.” She wagged her phone about for emphasis, “Sorry. I was down at the police station.”

“Any word?”

“They sent someone to talk to the pen pal. She doesn’t know anything. I think I might go talk to her tomorrow though.”

Arizona nodded.

“Are you seriously smoking because of this stuff with his potential girlfriend?”

“No. I’m smoking because a little girl came in starved, dehydrated and covered in mud.”

“What?”

“Only her hair was blond. And Gregg doesn’t like blonds.”

He hated them.

“You think it was him.”

“I know it was Jane.”

“Have you talked—“ Jane glanced at the hospital over Arizona’s shoulder, “have you talked to her?”

She shook her head, “She’s not ready to talk about it. We contacted the police though.”

“We should call the guy I spoke with. Let him know.”

“Williams right?”

“You know him?”

“No. Was just trying to remember the name.”

She took a long drag. Sucked the smoke in deep and shot it through her nose. It had been months—no—over a year since she smoked last. When she’d been wrestling with a fiancé and daughter in the hospital and a big gay wedding to plan. She’d smoked every night in the apartment as she looked over magazines and tried to process everything that had happened in the span of a few weeks.

And now the smoke burned her nostrils. Reminding her of how little she smoked and forcing her to fight a cough rising in her throat.

Jane cocked her head, “You okay?”

“That little girl was a message Jane. Telling me that he was here. Telling me he knows where I work. I’ve got a wife—a daughter. Why would I be okay?”

Jane started to hug her. Her arms came up and she stepped closer out of pure reflex but Arizona stepped back and Jane’s hand came down. Neither acknowledged it. “We’ll find him.”

“You’re talking to the pen pal tomorrow? I’m going with you.”

“You’re not a cop.”

“And you can’t show up at her house as one either. We’re going as curious parties. We’re finding this guy and we’re making sure that he never hurts another person again.”

Jane was surprised at her confidence, “You’ve thought about this.”

“He sent her to my hospital. Like a calling card.” That last sentence came out almost like a snarl. She started to take another drag of the cigarette in her hand but Jane snatched it from her hand. “Give it—“

The urge to fight left her in the face of Jane’s…it was the look she often got when Arizona had one course of action in mind and Jane wanted her to take another. “What happen to you telling me we weren’t twenty-somethings Nancy Drew? And the smoking? Did that girl showing up shave a few years off your age?”

Smug. That’s the word Arizona was looking for. Jane was being smug. So she did what she’d always done when their conversations hit this particular brick wall. 

“Shut up.”

  


####

“Did I ever tell you I’m not an outdoors person?”

Jane glanced at Arizona, who was dressed in a form fitting runners outfit replete with some very expensive running shoes. Jane, preparing for a day of trolling a major park in Boston in the spring, had opted for slacks, sturdy shoes and a light jacket.

“I kind of figured.”

“I spend nearly every hour of my life asleep or in the hospital. I don’t really need,” she motioned to Jane, “hiking clothes.”

It was their fourth morning of searching Riverway for more clues. Jane had brought a map in which she’d plotted out an intricate search grid and Arizona had gone through and schedule their search, figuring out how to walk their grid and when to maximize efficiency.

Her passion for the investigation had thrilled Jane. She was used to dating guys who weren’t too excited about her line of work. Now she was dating a woman who was eager to be a part of it all and who’s ridiculous attention to detail and excellent critical analysis skills were a perfect match for Jane. She was the Watson to Jane’s Sherlock.

“Or I could be the Robin to your Batman,” Arizona had mused in bed the night before.

“You really want to be a little circus kid in tights?”

“Clearly someone is not familiar with the Batman mythos. I’ll have you know there have been a multitude of Robins, including girl Robins and they are all just as badass as Batman, who is pretty badass in that tall, dark and broody kind of way.”

Jane raised an eyebrow.

“Tim and I always played superheroes as a kid. I was smaller and our last name is Robbins and—“

“You were pigeonholed.”

“Thoroughly.”

She was absolutely adorable. A blend of the girly girls that usually rankled Jane and the guys she’d found herself attracted to. Her very own sidekick, all done up in jogging gear and ready to help her hunt for criminals.

Only searching one of Boston’s largest and most populous parks with just a beat cop and a surgeon was not an easy task. It was long and arduous and Arizona had a tendency to get grumpy if she traipsed through the wooded areas too long.

“It’s the bugs. Why are there so many bugs? Don’t they know we’re in a city?”

“You’re adorable when you’re grumpy.”

Arizona shot her the finger. Then stumbled and fell. “Ouch.”

“Looks like some karma for hating nature.”

“Jane.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

“No. Jane.”

She jogged over to where Arizona was picking herself up and looked where she was pointing. At first it looked like the rest of their surroundings. But then she noticed the uniformity of the foliage. It wasn’t natural. She stepped closer and bent down. It was some kind of cloth with greenery sewn into it. With trembling fingers she carefully picked up one edge and looked.

They’d found it. They found the pit. And it was empty.

“What do we do now?”

Jane reached into her pocket and grazed her fingers of the casing of her phone. “We call the cops. Secure the area.”

“Aren’t you the cops?”

“Off duty and this should be handled by detectives.”

Arizona looked over the cloth. “He made this didn’t he. Sat in a little room in his pathetic little house and made this cloth.”

“Yeah,” she whispered, still shocked that they’d even found it.

“And we’re far enough from the trail that it’d be hard to hear. A little girl, starving and thirsty? She wouldn’t—“

Jane grasped her girlfriend’s hand and tugged her away from the site. “Come on. We’ve contaminated it enough.”

Back on the trail they took a seat underneath a tree. Arizona seemed to be in shock—desperately trying to understand what had just happened and kept rubbing her hands against the legs of her pants and popping her knuckles. Jane found Korsak’s number on her phone and called him.

A few people came by. One older guy stopped and stared. Jane tried to remember his face. He didn’t look like a creepoid who kidnapped girls and stuck them in a pit in the middle of the woods, but she wanted to commit his face to memory just in case. A younger guy, her age, stopped and grinned at them. He was sleek and handsome. “You ladies okay?”

“We’re fine, thanks,” Arizona said a little curtly.

He held his hands up in defense. “Sorry.”

Jane cast a sidelong glance at her girlfriend. 

“He was going to ask us on a date for a threesome.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Oh come on. That guy was like sex on a stick and he saw all this hotness just reclining under a tree? Even men are not immune to this charm Rizzoli.”

  


####

“I am immune to your charm Robbins.”

“What? You love our daughter. Why wouldn’t you want to take her?”

“Because you,” he stabbed at her chest with his finger, “want to pawn her off on me so you can go play with your ex.”

“That’s not—“

“What you’re doing? Really? So tell me why are you giving all your afternoon surgeries to Karev and begging me to pick Sofia up from daycare when you said you’d do it?”

“We’re not playing.”

Mark raised an eyebrow. 

“We—she has to make a trip an hour and a half out of Seattle and I offered to go with her. We’re just hanging out.”

“So hang out with our daughter too.”

“I can’t.”

Mark liked Robbins at least eighty-five percent of the time. But ever since this ex of hers had shown up that number had dropped to somewhere around fifteen percent. She was almost another person. Secretive. Evasive.

“You get that you’re not inspiring confidence right Robbins? Because to me it really feels like you’re going on an afternoon getaway with an ex and I have half a mind to thump you.”

She scowled, “Wow. You’re accusing me of cheating. Seriously?”

“Not accusing—“

“Because Mark between the two of us I’m not the one with a history of sticking my parts where they don’t belong.”

“Now you’re just being crude.”

“I have to go with Jane and it has nothing to do with what we used to be. It’s platonic.”

“So you’ve told Callie about your road trip.”

Nope. 

“Can you blame me? She’s convinced I’m in love with Jane just because I let her sleep on the couch.”

“I’m gonna go with Torres on that. It’s a little weird.”

“Yet we raise a beautiful daughter with **her** ex.”

“Yeah, but she also doesn’t get all secret and evasive when we do stuff together.”

She held her hands up in surrender. “I’m not arguing this with you Mark. I have to go with Jane and it wouldn’t be—I can’t take Sofia. So please, **please** do this for me.”

He studied her. “Is everything all right?”

She looked away. Then back. “It will be.”

“Robbins…”

Her pager went off and she shrugged, “Thank you Mark.”

“Tell your wife,” he called after her.

She waved him off and disappeared around the corner.

Secretive. Wierd. Running off with an ex. If she hurt Callie he was going to kill her.

  


####

Arizona, being a workaholic in a job where you could work a hundred hours a week and still work less than half your peers, didn’t get out of Seattle much. She saved up her vacation days and liked to go on big trips that involved spending all the money she made on frivolous things like bikinis for Callie. On the rare occasions that she did end up doing a day trip or overnighter out of Seattle it always ended up being to a bed and breakfast out to the west.

Their trip was to Cle Elum which involved driving east into the mountains and wishing they’d brought warmer clothing. She had to turn the heater on high and they stopped twenty minutes out of Seattle to buy giant cups of the hottest coffee she’d ever burnt her tongue on.

“You’re getting weak in your old age,” Jane noted when a particularly fierce shiver ran through her. “This is shorts weather back home.”

“Yes. Yes. You once went swimming in a bikini in a frozen river. Your ability to withstand cold temperatures is amazing.”

Jane had grinned and sipped her coffee.

Outside tall evergreens raced by as they went further up into the mountains. Jane kept craning her neck to marvel at the mountains and the clearest blue sky Arizona had ever seen. Up in the Cascades they avoided all the smog and fog. It was just blue skies and clouds so white and fluffy they looked more like a painter’s interpretation of the world.

“You know,” she mused, “you should come out sometime when we aren’t hunting a murderer. You could bring that doctor. We could all come up here to the mountains.”

Jane turned to look incredulously at here, “You hate the outdoors.”

“Yes, but you like them, and Callie…sometimes, and I bet your doctor does too.”

“That’s if she’ll ever talk to me again.”

“Her father was pointing a gun at you.”

“If I’d shot the Colonel?”

“Best sex of your life as a reward.”

Jane laughed, “I’m serious.”

Arizona wasn’t sure. Her dad was a saint. The guy was one of the most decorated Marines her family had ever seen and also a pretty fantastic father most days. Well…when he wasn’t running around puffing out his chest and talking about pride and country and how the liberals were destroying the military infrastructure. 

And Callie’s dad. She would never be crazy about the guy. Especially during that phase when he wanted to disown Callie because she was dating her, but she’d never felt it necessary to shoot him either.

“You know Callie’s mom won’t talk to us?”

Jane said nothing.

“She came up for the wedding and the day before decided Callie was going to hell because of Sofia and I. Wouldn’t hold my daughter and couldn’t look at me. And I hate her for it. I despise the woman for what she feels for me and what she did to my wife.”

“But Callie still loves her. Writes her letters. Tells her dad to send her love. The woman abandoned her on her wedding day and she sent her a Christmas present this year.”

“Maura’s dad abandoned her because he was a mobster on the run from the law and wanted her to have a better life. Not the same thing.”

“I know. I just—they’re parents. We may not like them. We may even hate them for what they do to the people we love, but we’ve got to tolerate them.”

“So I shouldn’t have shot him?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“She hates me Arizona. Can’t even look at me. And I want to hate her too.”

“For choosing him.”

Jane glanced up. She looked lost. Which was a rare thing for Jane. She reached across the center console and took her hand.

“If she’s not an idiot she’ll give you a second chance.”

Jane snorted, “She once dated a guy who used the royal “we” in conversation.”

Thirty minutes outside of Cle Elum they stopped at a worn down gas station to toss out their old coffee cups and fill up the gas tank. The place was as rural as rural could be. Salty road sludge had eaten away the bottom of the gas pumps and an antique tow truck on long deflated tires sat in front of the garage, because it was definitely one of those gas stations so old it actually had a garage attached.

“I feel like I should play a banjo,” Jane muttered under her breath. She’d gotten out of the car with Arizona and was chivalrously braving the cold with Arizona.

It took a minute to wrench the gas nozzle free. “I feel like I should get a tetanus shot just standing here.”

“You even sure the gas will work?”

The attendant was a young girl with bangs so trendy they’d gone right back around to early 90s tackiness. “It’s got to be younger than her.”

Jane trotted inside to pay and came back with off brand bottled water.

“Now I know I’ll get tetanus,” Arizona said before taking the offered bottle.

“It’s bottled from a local spring or from snow harvested by mountain goats or something.”

She raised a suspicious eye brow and opted not to drink the water. Jane was braver and gulped down half the bottle before loudly sighing in satisfaction.

They got back in the car and continued their drive. Coming around a corner Arizona was surprised to find Cle Elum suddenly laid out in front of them. It was an absurdly idyllic looking mountain town from afar.

She opened her mouth to say something to Jane about it but Jane spoke first.

“Why haven’t you told your wife about Gregg?”

She blinked and tried to figure out how the hell that had just come up.

“Why should I?”

“You think he’s stalking you. Shouldn’t you tell her?”

“Not if we find him first.”

“But why?”

“Jane…” She hoped her warning tone would put Jane off.

It didn’t. “You know if I thought for a moment he was going to be after Maura or my mom I’d tell them. I wouldn’t hesitate.”

Didn’t she get it. Hadn’t she met Callie. Perfect beautiful Callie. Hadn’t she met Arizona?

“Callie thinks I’m nice.” 

Damn it. It just came out. And now she’d said it and confused the hell out of Jane.

“She thinks I’m—butterfly scrub caps and perky Peds lady. That the worst thing I do is leave her at the airport when I go to Africa.”

“You left her for Africa.”

“And she hated me for it. I bailed. With her. With you,” she returned her eyes to the road lest Jane see the shame. “And I’m not supposed to bail. I’m not supposed to do…what we did to Gregg.”

“Leaving a woman so you could go to Africa is worse than what we did. If she forgave you—“

“And she doesn’t know I was engaged. She doesn’t know I loved someone and was with someone for **five years**. Before me she’d never had a relationship that lasted more than six months and she thinks I’m some kind of—well she doesn’t think there’s someone that once mattered as much as she does. And if she knows all that—if she knows about Gregg and what I did to you…I built a life Jane. A happy life and that would destroy it.”

“She married you. You married her. Some stupid stuff from your past won’t change that.”

“What if…what if it’s also about me? Keeping something apart from her. Keeping something for me.”

“Arizona…” Jane looked dumbfounded. Terrified. Elated. 

Horror built up inside of Arizona. She’d said it. Said something utterly taboo. 

“Pull out the map. The house should be around here somewhere.”

  


####

“Keeping something for me.”

Jane had gotten over Arizona. Really. She had. One day she’d thought about her every day and then the next she realized three days had gone by without her missing her. And Arizona had done the same. She found a woman she could commit to without excuses and she had a daughter.

But there was that if. That niggling feeling that maybe they could turn things around. Maybe they could forget three years and Maura and Callie and find each other again. All the reasons they’d broken up. All the hate and tears. They could forget it.

Arizona gripped the steering wheel tightly and a grimace, one she’d gotten all too familiar with in that last month of their lives together, was set upon her lips.

“That’s the house.” Jane pointed out the window to a fifties bungalow with a single car in the drive way. They got out and went to the door.

Butterflies formed in her stomach and for one brief moment she wished she had her gun on her.

Arizona looked at her curiously. “You okay?”

“Yeah—just a feeling.”

It got worse when they knocked on the door and no one answered. Arizona stepped away from the walkway to peek in. She blanched.

“Jane, open the door.”

“I can’t—“

“She’s on the ground in there. Open the door!”

Just like they’d taught her she lifted up her leg and pushed forcefully near the latch. The door fell open and Arizona was through it before Jane could stop her. She called out after her but Arizona was moving quickly through the house. She followed and found her leaning over a woman. There wasn’t any blood. Just dark marks around her neck.

Arizona checked for a pulse. Listened for breath. Then, because she was a doctor and not a coroner, she initiated CPR. “Call 911,” she told Jane. She ranted off medical facts that meant nothing to Jane and continued the CPR.

“Damn it. Her airway’s closed. Get me a knife, alcohol and a pen or straw or something. Now!” 

Jane reached the dispatch and said exactly what Arizona had told her. Then she ran into the kitchen to find the stuff Arizona had asked for. Only…only someone had messed with the microwave and there were wires coming out of it and into a trash can sitting in the middle of the kitchen. And gas. She hadn’t noticed it before, but the smell pervaded the room.

There was no time.

She ran.

No time at all.

She grabbed Arizona’s arm. 

They had to get out.

“We need her.”

No time Arizona.

Arizona tried to fight her but Jane was bigger and knew how to get a person moving.

Seconds. That was all they had. Seconds.

They reached the door. Went through it. The air was already cleaner smelling.

Arizona yanked her arm out of Jane’s hand. “What the hell were you doing?”

“There was a bomb.”

She waved her hand towards the house which continued to stand.

“That woman could survive.”

“She’s dead. Who knows how long.”

“And those are probably his fingerprints embedded in her neck!”

Arizona started to walk back towards the house. Jane grabbed her again.

“You can’t.”

Arizona sneered. That was why. The break up present all of the sudden. Never good enough for the fancy doctor from John Hopkins. She dug her hand in tighter.

“Let go. Now.”

Frigid too. 

“No.”

Arizona shoved her back. Took a step. Frigid and a know it all and such a damn jerk! She’d wanted to help. She’d tried to help. Back then. Tim was gone and she was supposed to be there. That’s what you did. You supported the one you love. You didn’t let them bury themselves in their work and hide away from the world. You made them address the problems.

But oh no. Arizona Robbins couldn’t be bother. She always had to run away. From everything. And here she was running away from Jane. Again. **Again!**  

She started to follow. Her foot touched the pavement.

Then the world exploded.


	6. Chapter 6

Korsak was a big guy that kind of reminded Arizona of her father. He was the boss. As soon as he arrived on the scene the other cops stood a little straighter. Then he smiled and he was more like a kindly uncle than an authoritative father.

The minute he saw Arizona and Jane leaning against the tree just outside the crime scene he rolled his eyes. “Officer Rizzoli.” Beside her Jane stood up straight enough that Arizona had the compulsion to say “at ease.”

“Detective,” Arizona greeted him. She smoothly stepped between her girlfriend and the detective.

He stopped, “Dr. Robbins, adding murder investigation to your resume?”

“We were out for a walk.” That sounded lame even to her and Korsak raised an eyebrow.

Jane caught her by the arm and moved around her, “We didn’t think the initial search was thorough enough.”

He sighed and glanced at the crime scene, “Normally I’d tell a cop like you that they’re out of line. Especially because they used their civilian friend to help and because it isn’t their case, but you two found a pit we’ve been looking for for over a week.”

“So we’re off the hook,” Arizona asked brightly.

“No. But I won’t arrest you despite being incredibly annoyed with both of ya.”

Beside her Jane visibly relaxed.

  


####

Everything was orange and white and there was a remarkable and unstoppable ringing in her ears. She tried to sit up and the world swam around her in a multitude of colors she couldn’t fathom but Maura probably knew on sight.

Bile. She could definitely taste bile. She tilted her body and unloaded the tepid gas station water onto the pavement.

Everything hurt but the movement made the pain especially significant in her ass. She groaned.

What had—

  


####

Jane, in her very hot and sexy uniform, leaned against the nurse’s station and sipped her coffee. Arizona leaned over it to drop off one chart and grab another. She didn’t miss the opportunity it afforded her girlfriend to check out her ass and her girlfriend didn’t miss it either. She smiled over the rim of her cup.

“I saw on the news last night that they’re asking for people to come forward again.”

Jane grimaced, “That never works. A hundred crazies and maybe one actual lead.”

“But this time they can narrow it down to a very specific part of Riverway.”

Jane considered that. Didn’t immediately discard it.

  


####

Her mouth tasted like ash. Which was kind of crazy. Arizona wasn’t big on eating ash. She had no idea what it actually tasted like. But it was definitely the flavor going on in her mouth.

Huh. She couldn’t see. That couldn’t be good.

Wait. Open your eyes Arizona. Grit and grime and it was wildly uncomfortable but—

Perfect.

Why was a house on fire?

  


####

Arizona set one plate in front of Jane. Paused to look over her shoulder. “What’s that?”

The warmth of her at Jane’s back was nice and even nicer when Arizona kissed her shoulder casually. She paused to scoop a fork full of pasta into her mouth before answering. “Korsak’s letting me look through all the tips they got.”

“I thought you said that was worthless.”

She’d thought so too. She flipped through and pulled out a photo. “This guy called with a crazy detailed tip. Recognize him.”

Behind her Arizona stilled. “He was at the park…they day we found it.”

“Want to go with me to talk to him?”

Arizona rested her head comfortably on Jane’s shoulder and reached around her to grab the photo and pull it closer. “I’d love too but they tend to get a little cranky when I skip cool surgeries to play detective.”

“Korsak already sent someone over to talk to him once. We would just be…friendly lesbians out for a stroll.”

  


####

Where was Arizona? She’d been in front of her. Headed for the house. 

She coughed.

She was gone?

There was movement. Beyond the flames. It hurt to turn her head. Everything hurt. Like being in a car crash time a billion. Arizona was lying on the ground. Still.

She cried out. That hurt too. 

She could see blood leaking from Arizona’s ear.

Get up Jane.

She pushed herself over onto her stomach. Tried to push herself up. Failed. Tried again.

Arizona was moving now. Trying to sit up and failing as badly as Jane. 

So she crawled. The heat of the burning house was too much. Fires were supposed to be soothing. You roasted marshmallows and curled up with your loved ones. Fires didn’t make you sweat. 

Glass bit into her hand and in frustration she tried to stand again. It helped. She stumbled and fell beside Arizona who was staring skyward.

“Arizona?”

Was she even breathing? Was she alive? The blood in her ear. The blood in both ears.

“Arizona!”

  


####

They stepped outside and shared a look. Jane held her hand out and Arizona immediately took it. Jane’s hands were larger, as calloused as her own but different. Where her callouses were from the instruments of the OR Jane’s were from the gun she practiced with religiously on the range.

They moved quickly away from the house and Arizona, never much of a big cuddler in public, pulled herself closer to Jane and wrapped her other hand around her arm. Jane looked down at her and smiled—not quite as cheerful as usual.

A block from the house they slowed their pace.

“He terrified me,” she whispered.

Jane stopped and turned. She brushed some of the hair from Arizona’s face. “You’re safe.”

“If he wasn’t the guy—“

“We can’t know for sure.”

“The way he acted. The way he looked at us.”

“At you.”

Arizona shuddered. She’d met awful people in her work. It was part of being a doctor. You healed everyone. Even crooks and thieves and abusers. But that man. On the surface he was handsome and sleek and kind. In his own home. Sitting across from him. His smile was oily and unnerving. His house smelled less like a home and more like a morgue. 

He was a monster. She was certain that if he’d ever appeared on her table she’d cut him open to find only evil. Pure and unformed and all consuming. 

Jane kissed her temple. “It’s okay.”

“He was evil Jane. I’ve never—“

“We’ll figure out a way.”

“How did they miss it?”

Jane shook her head. “He’s smart. He can get away with telling an overzealous cop and doctor on their day off stuff he’d never tell an actual investigating officer.”

“We have to call Korsak. Get him back here.”

“We will.”

They had to. 

His smile. “I love kids,” he said silkily, “don’t you?”

  


####

“Don’t you?”

Arizona blinked. Tried to pay attention. Jane was looking at her and patiently waiting for her to respond but there was a ringing in her ears that would likely be there for a day or two and the whole world looked sort of fuzzy. Like looking through loupes that needed to be cleaned.

“Don’t I what,” she asked a little too loudly.

“Think we should leave?”

The paramedics had already come and checked them out and encouraged them both to go to a hospital just to be safe. Arizona had insisted they were fine. She could still remember the explosion. The wall of pressure slamming into her like a giant punch bag and knocking her off her feet. She hadn’t lost consciousness  and apart from feeling like she’d been in a particularly bad car accident and have blood stains in her ears and down her neck she was fine.

Jane was also relatively fine. She had a huge knot on the back of her head where she’d struck the concrete, but her pupils were fine. There might have been a concussion but that was something Arizona could monitor from her own home. She didn’t need some po’dunk little hospital with a two bed ER to tell her that.

The cops had spoken with them as well. They’d told them exactly why they’d driven down. Explained the body in detail. And though the man speaking with them had seemed a little concerned he wasn’t about to question a big Boston police officer. A woman who’d once made waves in the police community for her handling of that man.

The Surgeon.

Arizona glanced down at Jane’s hands where the scars were a pale white against her tan skin. She still remembered Angela’s calls. Remembered how she’d pleaded with her to come back. Arizona had hung up the phone. Gone out for drinks. Seen a pretty girl in a bar and married her.

“Yeah,” she said—her voice still tight from the smoke, “let’s go.”

Arizona drove them back. Her vision was wonky but unlike Jane she wasn’t at as high a risk for a concussion. The explosion had blown out the windows in her car and their hair got caught up in the wind, whipping around their faces and tangling instantly.

She glanced over at Jane, who in the darkness of early evening still looked like ten shades of hell, and laughed.

“What’s so funny,” her ex grumbled.

“You look awful.”

“Check out a mirror Arizona. You looked like you got whipped across a lawn in an explosion and you smell just as bad.”

Even in the wind tunnel that was her car the stench of a burning home lingered.

Jane leaned against her door with her hand on her chin, “Will hate to be you when we get home.”

Callie. Oh shit Callie. But… “It’ll be fine.”

Jane rolled her eyes and looked back out the window.

  


####

Of all the—Callie clenched her teeth to keep from cursing. Normally the sight of Mark with their daughter wouldn’t make her angry. He was a great dad and their daughter was perfect, but she was supposed to be meeting with Arizona after work. Not Mark. She and Arizona were going to go out with Sofia. Away from the ex in the apartment and everything unsaid.

“Mark,” she said sweetly, so as to not let onto Sofia how angry she was, “where’s Arizona?”

He shrugged, “Robbins bailed. Had to go do something with that police chick.”

A few years ago the idea of the person she loved cheating on her emotionally or physically would have devastated her. Would have sent her into a tailspin of depression, pity and absolute self-loathing. In fact that was exactly what had happened with George.

But Arizona wasn’t George and Callie was no longer the guy turning an intern into her very own McDreamy. Instead she was a mature and responsible mother and wife who knew for a fact her wife would never cheat physically. Arizona would never leave her. The woman bailed at the sign of a sneeze but had stuck by her bed through one of the most traumatic brain injuries a person could experience. She was stuck with the obstinate and stubborn moron.

So instead she was just pissed. Righteously furious. Mark didn’t comment. He’d learned at some point that getting between Callie and Arizona wasn’t a good idea (gorgeous babies not withstanding). He raised an eyebrow.

“Sofia staying with me tonight?”

“I’ll flay her.”

“If it helps she seems really—I don’t know—it didn’t seem like it was easy for her?”

“I know it isn’t Mark. Whatever’s going on is eating her alive. I just wish she’d **tell** me instead of leaving me like this. Forcing me to…to watch.”

He held Sofia out. “Hug the perfection. You need it.”

She really did. She pulled her baby into her arms and watched her snuggle against her breast and for half a second she didn’t want to find her wife and throttle her. “Why do babies cure everything?”

Mark shrugged, “Most babies don’t. Sofia’s some kind of magical perfect baby.”

“My perfect little crack baby,” she said affectionately. Mark rolled his eyes. He was not okay with the nickname but had stopped trying to fight it.

They stepped out into the brisk winter air and actually ran into a man. Like, bodily. Callie felt the air rush out of her and stepped back, clutching Sofia protectively towards her. Mark caught her by the elbow.

The guy she’d run into immediately started apologizing profusely and rambling about his daughter in the hospital. Callie tried to be gracious and they stepped around him after wishing he and his daughter well.

“Did you see that guy Mark?”

“I did.”

“He was hot.” Like crazy model hot. “All sleek. Like a tiger.”

“Please, never try to describe a person again.”

She glanced back. Just for a second. Just because she didn’t run into guys that good looking in real life very often. And he was standing in the entry way to the hospital lobby, his hands in his pockets and he was staring straight at her.

And for just a second the eye contact and heated way he stared wasn’t erotic. It was terrifying. Like being watched by some predator. 

  


####

Half a bottle of wine into the evening the door opened and the scent of burning building—a caustic smell quite unlike that of a campfire—filled the room. She set her glass down and stood to watch her wife and the friend come in.

They were covered in soot.

And bruises.

And there were bandages and light scrapes.

And dark dried blood ran from Arizona’s ears down her neck. She looked at Callie almost…almost sheepishly. Like she’d gotten a little drunk and missed a special dinner or forgot to pick up snacks for the daycare.

The whole world turned red as Callie felt herself get angry.

“Callio—“

“What happened?”

Arizona glanced at Jane.

“Don’t look at her. Tell **me**.”

Jane jerked her thumb in the direction of Sofia’s bathroom. “I should just—“

“Do.” 

Jane skittered into the bathroom and the shower immediately turned on. Callie returned to staring at her wife who stared back and said nothing.

“Are you okay?”

“I blew my eardrums. The car needs new windows.”

She couldn’t even— “What happened?”

Arizona was so tight lipped. She looked at the blood. Came close. Arizona tried to stand still but swayed a little.

“What happened,” she asked more quietly.

“I did something.”

She stroked her wife’s cheek. Let her hand wander. The blood flaked away under her touch.

“Callie I’m so—“

“Tell me.” She tried not to sound authoritative but failed. Tears welled in her wife’s eyes. They always did when people commanded instead of demanded. There was an infinitesimal difference that was absolutely critical to Arizona. Tears fell. Washed away the soot and left bright tracks down her cheeks.

“I helped put a man in jail once.” 

Callie’s hand stilled.

“And he got out.”

“He did this?”

Arizona nodded.

She couldn’t think. Couldn’t process it. Arizona pleaded with watery blue eyes that were bright against the soot on her face. Pleaded for understanding and absolution. It dawned on her.

“That’s why Jane is here?”

Another nod.

Her arm was faster than her mind and her hand cracked against her wife’s cheek. The sound was defining in the confines of the apartment. A vivid right mark appeared almost instantly on Arizona’s face. Not as red or as eye catching as the blood down her neck.

“Damn it!” Arizona startled at the exclamation. “Did you even go to the hospital?”

“I wasn’t unconscious—“

“You could have a skull fracture Arizona. I probably just made it worse!” 

She grabbed Arizona’s forearm and dragged her out the door.

  


####

Her cheek was on fire and the aching heat burned hotter than the unshed tears.

She should be crying. She’d failed her wife. Hurt her wife. She ached all over and Gregg was still out there and Callie was so furious. But the tears just seemed to linger in her eyes. They refused to be shed. Callie ranted all the way down the elevator. About Arizona and Jane and secrets and stupidity.

“I’m sorry,” she said when they were outside. She tried to sound sincere.

Callie spun on her. “No. No. Arizona you tell me things. I’m your wife. Some nut job wants to hurt you you **tell me** you don’t—“ She waved her hand. She didn’t actually know about the bomb yet. Or the dead woman.

“Try to find him on my own and nearly get blown up?”

God she sounded ridiculous.

Callie paled. A feat as her face had just been flushed with fury.

“You’re an idiot,” she said with some finality. She started to guide them towards the hospital again. Stopped. Turned. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why did one of the smartest women I know eschew hospitalization despite bleeding from her ears? Why did you trust that cop up there over me?”

“She’s not just some cop. Or some ex.”

“I know that. Clearly.”

Tell her. It was Jane in her head looking at her plaintively.

“She was my fiancé.”

Callie looked like she wanted to slap her again and she braced for the impact. But instead her hand curled into a fist. Her knuckles audibly popped. Her jaw clenched tightly.

Finally she let out a shuddering breath that seemed to expel much of the anger. She glanced up at the apartment over their head. “How long,” she asked, “how long were you together.”

“Five years.”

It was like she’d slid a knife between Callie’s ribs. Her mouth opened in shock. She swallowed. “You’d just broken up when you came here.”

She nodded.

“So me. I’m a rebound.” She sounded broken.

No. “Callie you’re my wife.”

“No. No a wife is someone you tell things to. You tell a wife you were engaged. You tell a wife about whatever this,” she motioned at Arizona’s soot covered form, “is. A wife is someone you trust. You don’t cheat on a wife.”

“I didn’t—“

“You may not have fucked her Arizona but you’ve been cheating on me since she arrived.”

“Callie-“

“Damn it stop! Just…stop. Just…” She took a deep breath. Gathered herself. Callie never did that. She spoke with immediacy. She never hid her feelings. She was open and wonderfully awesome and everything Arizona had difficulty being. It was why they worked so well together. They complemented one another. Callie scared to speak—Callie choosing her words—that was terrifying. “Do you love her?”

She’d broken her wife. As smoothly as Gregg had devastated her she had devastated Callie. Any other day she would have pressed Callie to the apartment building wall and kissed away her fears. But not today. She’d danced around it long enough and there was no escape. From the errant machinations of Hamilton Gregg or from her wife’s tremulous fear.

Yes. Of course she loved Jane. She always would. That should—could never be questioned. But… “Not the way I love you.” Callie took another step back. Arizona took another step towards her. “Callie I had a choice. I’ve **always** had a choice. And I **chose** you.” She stepped closer to Callie who was still vibrating with anger but just words away from tears. “Forever and always, remember?”

A callback to their vows. Spoken softly before family and friends. Callie had glowed that day. They both had.

  


####

Callie didn’t run. It wasn’t in her nature. Arizona ran. Arizona always ran. When things were tough she disappeared and processed it and tried to come out stronger. Callie didn’t. She ran headlong into the pain with arms outstretched and damn it she tried to fix it. To move past it. 

But sometimes…sometimes she needed a break. She needed a minute escape from the pain. She found it in her daughter and her friends and she always—always found escape in her wife’s embrace. Except her wife was standing there looking frightened and apologetic and wonderful and awful and all Callie wanted to do was run. Escape the woman opposite her and all the pain she’d caused. She wanted to shut the door in her face. Send her far away.

But that wasn’t what you did when you were married. The red outline of her hand still stung Arizona’s face and she bore it like a perfect little martyr. Just as she stood there wafting in the winter breeze. She was Callie’s and that much she knew in an instant. Because Arizona did run. Always, but there she stood accepting Callie’s justified anger. She didn’t have to come home. She could have gone to a hospital and gotten cleaned up and checked out and Callie might never have known.

But she walked in the door.

She told Callie the truth.

In her own emotionally stunted way Arizona was trying to do what was right. Even if it took an explosion—an explosion!—to force her into it.

“This guy? Did you all get him?”

“He wasn’t there.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“And Jane?”

“She’s here to protect me.”

Of course.

“The cops?”

“Are looking for him. But Callie we had a girl come in last night,” she went somewhere dark and distant for a moment, “he’s here in Seattle. He’s active. He’s dangerous.”

“Is that why you’re telling me? Now.”

She sort of shrugged, “I wanted to find him. I wanted to protect you. Sofia—“

She stepped close. Because as angry as she was—and she would be angry for a while—she still loved the idiot. “Hey,” she said softly, “this is a marriage. You protect me, but I protect you. Okay?”

Arizona nodded and perhaps it was the relief of it all being out there, or the exhaustion, or the lingering effects of surviving an explosion but she finally wept. And Callie—Callie embraced her.

They’d figure it out. Somehow.

  


####

A hot shower washed away the grime and eased some of the aches but Jane still shuffled out of the bathroom like someone a good forty years older than herself. She took a seat in the rocker next to the baby’s empty crib.

The apartment was quiet. So either Callie had murdered Arizona or they were off discussing the events of the day. 

She’d told her. Arizona Robbins, who could keep secrets like a CIA agent had finally told her wife. Part of it had been unavoidable. She knew that. But part of Jane…part of Jane had kind of hoped she’d keep it a secret. Keep **Jane** a secret. That they’d go right on having their private little tête à têtes. 

Because she’d missed it. Having someone who knew her completely. Who understood her. Even though they’d broken up. Even though their reasons were still present she’d missed the ease of her relationship with Arizona.

Because nothing had been easier.

Even Maura. Maura whom she loved and hated and dreamt about. Maura didn’t know. About the five year relationship with a woman or Hamilton Gregg.

She sighed and scrounged her phone up out of her bag. She did the math in her head. Maura would be asleep, her phone off or on silent. So she punched in the familiar number and waited.

  


####

She woke up to find a message blinking at her from the screen of her phone. Pulling the menu down she noted, with something between shock and elation, that the call was from Jane. She glanced over at the files on her kitchen counters. Research about a man that had once hurt Jane deeply.

Her fingers didn’t tremble when she pressed the requisite buttons to listen to the voicemail. She held the phone up to her ear.

Jane’s familiar gravelly tone was a balm. A forgotten bit of another life and Maura smiled.

It had only been days but it felt like years.

“Uh, hey.” She coughed into the phone. “Sorry. Sorry. So I’m in Washington—Seattle. And I don’t know what my mom said. Or Korsak. If they said anything. But I’m here because before I knew you I knew Arizona. She was my—we were engaged. I know. Jane Rizzoli, the straightest woman you’ve ever met, was with a woman. But I was. I guess I’m bisexual or something. I never really think about it.”

“But I loved her once and she’s in trouble so I came.”

Jane sighed loudly into the phone and for the span of a moment Maura thought she’d hung up.

“Look I’m sorry. You hate me and you have that right. I don’t know what I do. I don’t know if I’ll ever change what I did, but I did it and I get it—you Maura. I get you. He’s your dad. And I nearly took him away from you and I knew. I knew how important he was and I shot anyways.”

“So I’m sorry. I can’t ask you to forgive me. I won’t. I don’t have that right, but I wanted to tell you you know? Because I’m out here with Arizona and she’s married to this woman and she’s so damned happy and I miss that. I miss being happy.”

“I just…I miss you Maura. And I’m sorry.”

The message ended and the little automated service asked if she’d like to save it but Maura was already sliding to the ground and hugging her legs.

Because she missed being happy too.

And she missed her best friend.

More than she ever thought she would.


	7. Chapter 7

She remembered the day she met Jane. She was dressed up like the most ridiculous stereotypical prostitute Maura had ever seen. While intellectually she knew that most prostitutes did not, in fact, dress that way, the rough working class Boston accent and the entertaining undressing of the commissary manager clouded her judgement. She thought, very naively, that she really was meeting her first honest to goodness street hooker and she offered to buy her coffee.

Angela laughed, “Jane was wearing turquoise eye shadow?”

“It was a very arresting shade on her.”

“When was this?”

She told her. Angela frowned.

Maura continued, “She was so grumpy. Jane’s always grumpy but that day in particular she was wildly unpleasant.”

And intriguing. Thoroughly intriguing. Maura wasn’t a people person but that day she knew she wanted to get to know the sex worker (or more likely, the vice cop) better.

“That was right after Tim died.”

“Tim?”

“Arizona’s brother. They were real close. He died over in Iraq and a few months later she and Jane were dividing up their things like they were going through a divorce.”

Arizona. Arizona Robbins. The familiarity of the name had bothered Maura and finally she’d looked her up. She’d been a few years ahead of Maura at John Hopkins. Top of her class. Chief resident of the surgical program at Mass Gen. Peds head at Seattle Grace Mercy West and one of the youngest recipients of the Carter Madison grant ever.

If Maura were to ever be envious of another doctor it would be that woman.

“I went to school with her,” she noted.

That surprised Angela. “You did?”

“Mm hm. She was a few years a head of me. Very accomplished. By all accounts an excellent doctor.”

Angela nudged her with her shoulder, “I like you better.”

“Angela,” she chastised.

Angela had always struck Maura as relatively conservative. She was always desperate for her little girl to settle down and get married and because of that fond desire for a stereotypical relationship Maura had just assumed the woman was socially conservative.

But her bitterness towards Arizona Robbins had nothing to do with her gender. It had nothing to do with Jane’s apparently fluid sexuality.

“What? That woman broke my little girl’s heart.”

She didn’t like Arizona Robbins because the doctor had hurt her daughter. Natural. Like any mother. They took their children’s sides. Even when—

“I hardly think I’ve been fair to Jane either.”

“But you didn’t string her along for years and years Maura. You have a good reason to be mad at her.”

She did. An excellent reason. Jane knew her father and her father knew her and he wouldn’t have shot. She **knew** that. But Jane had shot any ways and then acted like Maura was the silly one for being mad.

And then Jane called and spoke of missed opportunities for joy.

“Jane called me.”

Angela leaned forward her warm hand on Maura’s knee.

“I think…for Jane it was an apology.”

“She misses you you know.”

“I do. And I miss her. But I can’t figure out a way to rectify this problem.”

“Someone has to give.”

An astute assessment. But the question was who: her or Jane?

  


####

Out of habit Callie slipped into scrubs and a lab coat before meeting up with Arizona outside of Radiology. Her wife noted the change in clothes but said nothing. Just held up the x-rays. “X-rays are done? I’m told I have a perfectly shaped head that’s fracture free.”

She shook her head and snatched the films out of her hand, “Great. You gambled with your brain and won. Do you want a hug for that?”

“I want you not to be mad about it.“

“You’re an idiot,” she said quite sincerely.

“I’m sorry,” Arizona responded, just as sincere.

She’d said it so many times in the last hour that the apology was starting to lose meaning. It was rote. She slung her wife into an exam room and shut the door firmly behind them. “Stop it.”

That managed to startle Arizona.

“You keep apologizing. And I get it. You maybe even feel bad. I get that too. But you need to stop.”

“What—what do you want me to do?”

She stepped close to Arizona. Studied her. The scratches on her face and the wariness in her eyes. A wariness that had been there since Jane arrived.

“All this time…what were you hiding? Her? Or him?”

Arizona didn’t look away. She swallowed and her eyes wandered. Not away from Callie, but from her eyes to her lips. 

“Both,” she whispered.

She took her wife by the waist and pressed her back into the door. Pressed her forehead to Arizona’s and spoke in a hushed and harsh tone. “I **need** you to be honest with me Arizona. I can’t—I need you.” She readjusted her grip on Arizona’s waist. Held her tighter. Pushed her back against almost violently. “I trust you. You know that?” Her voice was cracking. She closed her eyes.

Arizona had sprung a leak and was crying again. She nodded. “I do,” she said softly. The smell of fire still surrounded her and even her breath seemed to have been saturated in the smell. But she could still feel the puff of air on her face. The things her wife did to her. She made Callie a better person. A different person.

She opened her eyes. Arizona was so close she could see the tears clinging to her eye lashes. Clumping them together. It wasn’t grief bringing Arizona to her knees. It was the demand Callie was making. The one she’d always made. Her wife was a cypher and Callie demanded the key.

“So trust **me**. Be with **me**. Make **this** a marriage.”

Arizona’s hand rose and curled around the back of her neck. She leaned up into a kiss and pressed her lips, salted by her tears, to Callie’s. She could feel her trembling against her and even through the veil of anger she felt the pity and concern well up. She missed her wife, but more importantly, she wanted to help her. 

Arizona was always the strong one. The good woman in a storm. And Callie could honestly say she’d never seen her wife at a loss. Never seen her faltering at the weight of responsibilities. She might run from major emotional problems, but even then there was this cockiness—an intoxicating self-assuredness—that she maintained.

Arizona wasn’t fragile.

She didn’t balk. 

But the woman she was kissing was terrified. By Jane. By this crazy guy stalking her. Especially by Callie. So as much as she hated her wife for the lies she had gladly lived she still recognized her struggle.

She deepened the kiss and tried to ignore the pungent smell still clinging to Arizona’s skin. Maybe if she kissed her hard enough—deep enough she could heal her. Could fix the dispirited woman before her and bring back the one she’d married. 

Arizona moaned into her mouth and her came up to cup Callie’s face and hold her in place. They couldn’t be separated then. If one tried to pull back the other pulled forward. Only air was allowed between them. 

But as quickly as the wound seemed to be healed by a kiss it was reopened. There was a knock at the door and they broke apart, breathless. Arizona’s lips were a bruised red. The bright color was at odds with the soot and blackened dried blood and scabs on her face and neck. It was like a spot of life in a harbor of death.

The knock was louder now. And then a deep and unfamiliar male voice spoke.

“Doctor Robbins.”

Her wife froze and for half an instant Callie was certain the stalker had found her.

“This is Detective Williams? Seattle PD.”

They both sighed and shared a look confirming that Arizona had actually suspected the same thing Callie had. Arizona gave her a peck on the cheek and turned in her arms to face the door. “Yes?”

“I need to speak to you…preferably not through a door.”

Callie kissed her wife’s neck, “We should probably let him in.” A little reluctantly she let go of Arizona and stepped back—grabbing the films just as the door opened and moving to the view box to examine them.

The detective, an attractive if vaguely bland man, looked surprised to see Callie. Arizona smiled brightly, the mask of happiness she wore so well slipped into place. “You were looking for me?” She sounded curious. Delighted. Like they were playing a game. Like he wasn’t here because of the bomb she’d survived.

He glanced back over at Callie.

“My wife,” Arizona provided. The smile faltered. Not to the common observer. But Callie saw it. It was all in the eyes. Which were sharp and focused.

“Heard you and Rizzoli ran into some trouble in Cle Elum this evening.”

She continued to smile serenely but said nothing. Callie privately enjoyed the scene. That was her wife, polite, but trying to get information from her was like milking a stone and she was happy to see someone else make the attempt.

“Your girl from last night is fine,” he provided.

“I know,” she said far too confidently.

He scowled. “Right. Okay. So in light of events today you need to stay away from that girl. Her care should be transferred elsewhere.”

“Excuse me?”

They all looked surprised as Callie was the one that had said that. She continued, “Why on earth—“

“Your wife and her ‘friend’ went down there to talk to that woman and she’s dead now. Murdered. They’re people of interest.”

“You think I killed that woman? That I’d hurt that girl?”

“I think they never found who killed those girls in Boston and that it’s suspicious that one appears after you move here. And I think that man put you in the hospital for two weeks and that might have made you angry enough to hurt people connected to him.”

He glanced over at Callie and she realized her mouth was hanging open. She knew for a fact she look stunned. A whisper of a smile crossed his lips. Arizona followed his look to Callie and she immediately grew pale.

Two weeks? This guy was blowing up buildings and kidnapping kids and putting her wife in the hospital and— “No.” she said firmly, “this guy kidnapped a kid and put her in our hospital. Not my wife. And not the cop who’s been in Seattle less than a week. And he put my **wife** in the hospital. He murdered a woman and blew up her house to cover his tracks and you’re really going to focus primarily on my wife and her ex?”

“We don’t have any proof that he harmed that girl or murdered that woman.”

“And you don’t have any proof my wife harmed them either. So I suggest that if you want to come back here with poorly planned accusations you speak to our attorney first.”

Arizona’s mouth snapped shut as she fought not to say whatever she really wanted to say. Callie came up behind her and wrapped an arm around her wife’s waist. It bolstered Arizona. “I’ll see to it that her care is transferred to Seattle Pres. You can send an officer down to watch and everything.”

She had no idea what the guy had expected to learn from them when he’s sailed in with bad ideas and even worse presentations but he now looked suspiciously from one woman to the other. His plans, whatever they’d been, were faltering. 

“Now if you’ll excuse us, my wife has yet to be treated for the incident this afternoon and needs medical attention. You should leave.”

Callie was a surgeon. An attending at a top tier hospital and she was used to being listened to. And the detective must have realized that because he didn’t argue with her. Just turned to Arizona and said, “Try to make yourself available for further questions please.”

He left and both women slumped in relief. “Thanks,” Arizona whispered.

She reached out and took her hand. Ran her thumb along the muscles and tendons. Arizona had beautiful hands. At night she liked to hold those hands up to the moonlight and look at them. She could list off every detail and each minute imperfection and just running her thumb across their surface settled her just a tiny bit.

But she couldn’t actually look at Arizona. The anger was still too present.

“I need,” she said, “you to tell me everything. Who this guy is. What he did. I have to know. I trust you. I love you. But Arizona, I **have** to know what we’re dealing with.”

So Arizona told her. She spun a tale of starry eyed twenty somethings out to save the world and forced to face off against the worst that humanity to create. And by the end she felt no better than she had at the beginning. She felt only numb.

No. Not numb. It was terror. Deep and incapacitating. Now she knew what Hamilton Gregg could do. And it made everything exponentially worse.

  


####

Ma was sobbing. Loud wet sobs. She was inconsolable. It was worse than when she’d rent Love Story and force Jane to sit and watch it with her when she was a kid. Her father took a long draught of his beer and looked from weepy wife to apologetic daughter and muttered something about space.

He couldn’t actually **get** much space. They were at Jane’s apartment and it was paid with the combined salaries of a surgical resident and a police officer. It was nice. A good location and hard wood floors and a fantastic bathroom, but it was also small and lacked the big deck her parent’s place had.

She’d invited them over. One to show off her new place. And two to break it to them that she was sharing the rent with Arizona and the apartment was a one bedroom.

Angela had been slow on the uptake. It was her father that said it quite succinctly, “Jane’s a lesbian.”

To be fair she was bisexual, but she wasn’t ready to tackle that nuance of her sexuality so quickly. Especially as her mother was still sobbing.

“Ma,” she said her name. Part pleading with her to stop crying and partly to console her.

“Grandkids,” she wailed. “I was gonna have grandbabies.”

“You still can. I’m sleeping with a woman not sterile.”

“But how are you—my grandbabies are going to come from a turkey baster!”

She patted her mother on the back and glanced behind her. Her dad had wandered into her bedroom with the rest of the six pack and shut the door behind him. That would be fun later.

“I just—what did we do wrong? Was it because we made you share a room with Tommy? Because we let you be a cop?”

She had to fight the desire to thump her mother, “Ma. Or course not. It just…happened.”

“And you met this woman on the job. What is she? A hooker?”

“A doctor.”

The hiccuping sobs ceased immediately.

“She went to John Hopkins and she’s doing her residency here at Mass Gen. She’s a surgeon.”

“You snagged a doctor?”

“Yeah mom. I did.”

Somehow that made everything better. Apparently her mother could overlook the whole woman thing because Arizona was also an accomplished doctor with a decorate Marine officer for a father and another one for a brother. In fact, she suspected that if Arizona had been a man her ma probably would have left her dad for her.

Her father still didn’t handle the news quite as well as his wife and chose to spend the rest of the evening quietly getting drunk and pondering his daughter’s newly revealed sexuality.

Her mother though—after dinner she took up Arizona’s giant laptop and started typing like a cavewoman on it. “Did you know,” she called out, “that gay marriage is legal here?”

She hadn’t.

“I know you can’t get married in the Catholic church but I do know an Episcopalian. They’re like Catholics.”

Her mom had always called them “fake Catholics” growing up.

“And there are some really love Episcopalian churches. I bet we could get you married in one of those.”

“Ma we just started living together. I think it’s too soon to start planning weddings.”

Her mother’s sharp look indicated that it was **not** too soon. 

Around ten she poured her mother and herself a cup of decaf and eyed her father, who had passed out on the couch. Her mom noticed her look and patted her hand, “Your father’s just a little shock. Give him a couple of days.”

“He drank himself into a stupor and passed out on my couch.”

“His only little girl just told him she’s moved in with a lesbian lover.”

A doctor too. She saw her mother amend it in her head and rolled her eyes. Which her mother promptly misinterpreted. “Now don’t give me that. This is a shock Jane. You can’t get mad that it takes us a minute to process it.”

“Sorry,” she grumbled.

They sipped their coffees in silence and her father lightly snored. If she wanted to be honest and not just irritated as she was ninety percent of the time she dealt with her parents then she had to admit she was impressed with how they’d handled her coming out. She’d expected more tears. Maybe a damnation or two. She definitely hadn’t expected that she’d still be nursing a cup of coffee with her mother when Arizona came in at ten thirty.

Her girlfriend paused in the doorway—surprised to find they had company. But the shock wore off quickly and she threw on her winningest smile. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you Mrs. Rizzoli.”

Ma recovered quick enough to greet her, but she didn’t give her one of her big bone crushing hugs like she normally gave her kids’ dates. They chatted for a little bit, with Ma grilling Arizona and Arizona being a pitch perfect girlfriend despite coming off a forty-eight hour shift. Finally everyone agreed it was time to call it a night and Jane helped her dad down to the car and came around to give her a hug.

“She past the muster Ma?”

“She’s a good girl Jane. She seems to really like you.”

“I like her too.” 

Ma raised an eyebrow. “You’re living with her now. It had better be more than like.”

She hugged her mom once more for the road and trudged back up the stairs. Arizona had showered in that super speedy way doctors all seemed to move and was sitting on the couch in her robe looking at through the box of evidence they’d collected.

Hamilton Gregg was still on both their minds. Even though Korsak had threatened to have her fire if she bothered the guy. She’d simply made her investigation more low key and Arizona took on any leg work on her days off.

“I was doing this Heller myotomy on an eight year old this morning and I thought of something.”

Jane flopped down on the couch next to her and laid her head in Arizona’s lap. From her new vantage point she had a clear view of what Arizona was looking at. It was the time lines she’d created for the victims.

“Korsak said Gregg’s out because he had an alibi for Amy right?”

Amy was victim number three.

“Right.”

“He couldn’t have possibly watched her die, retrieved the body, and dump it half a mile from the pit because he was out at a party.”

“That is the claim.”

“What if she climbed out?”

They’d been over that one. The girls were all far too weak to have climbed up the twelve feet necessary. Amy hadn’t even been the fittest of them.

Arizona continued her to explain her theory, “So today in surgery this kid’s sinus rhythm goes crazy and for some reason it made me think of these children. Specifically Amy. She didn’t die from from dehydration like the others. I mean. She did. But we had her on a heart monitor before she died and her heart…there was something more than dehydration going on.”

Jane sat up and pushed her hair away from her face. Arizona was asking her something. In that roundabout way of hers. “You want me to get the coroner’s report.”

“She might have had something in her system. Something that would have kept her moving. Gotten her out of that pit. If so—“

“Gregg’s alibi goes kaput.”

“Exactly.”

Damn it. Arizona had to have a great idea. Had to come home after a hard day and make nice with Jane’s parents and then have a great idea involving their case. And she had to look gorgeous doing it all. 

“You know, if Korsak finds out I’m snagging the coroner’s report.”

“You could always tell me how to do it. The police part. I did a stint in a morgue once you know.”

“So I’m gonna teach you how to steal a coroner report from the police?”

“Makes me way more awesome than anyone else you dated right?”

It really kind of did. She loved a woman who could get involved in Jane’s work.

  


####

She woke up to find Callie Torres leaning against the door and staring. Her arms were crossed over her chest and she’d pushed the sleeves up on her red sweater giving her a bit of a threatening appearance. “How you feeling,” she asked.

Jane moaned, “Headache.”

“I bet. You got knocked a loop. I’ve been monitoring you all night though and you seem fine so far.” But just to be safe Callie proceeded to ask her a number of questions to ascertain her cognitive faculties. Or at least that’s what she said the questions were for. Jane answered as best she could and marveled at Callie’s…awakeness.

“You’ve really been up all night?”

“Sure.”

“You just seem—“

“I was a surgical resident not too long ago. We’re kind of awesome at going without sleep.”

Of course she would be. Arizona had been the same way. She’d have epic shifts that seemed to last for days and still find time to curl up on the couch with Jane and talk about her own job.

When Callie was satisfied with the state of Jane’s brain she started in on another avenue of discussion that made it very clear why she’d been up all night playing nurse to Jane. “Detective Williams stopped by and spoke with Arizona.”

“Here?”

“At the hospital. Then Arizona told me,” she made the next part very clear, “everything.”

Oh.

“And now that I know I’m going to go against the crazy jealous monster inside and ask you to stay here until they catch this guy.”

She peered up at the other brunette. “You’re that worried,” she asked. Almost in awe. For a woman that had just learned everything she seemed calm. Secure. And set on a very specific course of action.

“This guy put my wife in the hospital once. And now he’s here stalking her and sending her,” that part she struggled with, “he’s sending her messages. I’m not worried. I want to kill him. But barring that an armed officer of the law hanging out in my living room every day and protecting my family is the next best thing.”

“So I’m—“

“You’re staying.”


	8. Chapter 8

She could safely admit that she’d never dismiss Arizona’s jealously over her relationship with Mark ever, ever again. They were sitting at the breakfast bar quietly eating breakfast with Jane Rizzoli and not talking and she got it. Understood where Arizona had been coming from after Africa and before Sofia. And now that she understood it she genuinely hated it.

She didn’t hate Jane. Not really. She seemed nice enough, if a bit brusque. No, she just hated having someone in her home that seemed to know Arizona as well, if not better, than she did. Now that everything was out in the open the two apparently felt comfortable fondly reminiscing about the past. Or Jane did. She’d talk about family gatherings and crazy coworkers and Timothy and Arizona would smile—the joy not quite covering up the long lingering grief beneath.

That maybe bothered Callie more than having this woman in her home that knew Arizona so intimately. The way the woman seemed to miss the little things. She couldn’t **quite** read Arizona right. Didn’t know when to push Arizona and when to back away. It was like they were cogs of a watch just a hair out of a place.

And because of it there was hurt on Arizona’s face. A melancholia that Callie could not cure.

Jane got up and wordlessly took Arizona’s empty coffee cup. Refilled it just the way Arizona liked it and handed it back. Arizona didn’t even notice, too wrapped up in the newspaper. She took it and drank it like always.

“So, Jane,” Callie said, being an adult and polite, “I’m going to be doing an ACL repair using a cadaver graft today. You should come by.”

Jane paused with her coffee cup perched on her lips. She looked from Arizona to Callie. “What?”

“Your investigation is stalled right? Because the cops thing you two did it?”

“That’s not—“

“It kind of is,” Arizona interrupted.

“So you can come to the hospital. Keep an eye on Sofia. Watch surgeries from the gallery.” Where Callie could keep an eye on her daughter as well.

Jane’s face softened as she realized what was being asked of her. “A cadaver what’s it sounds…neat.”

Arizona raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been hanging out with that fancy pathologist too much.”

“What? Neat is a word.”

“Yeah for fancy pathologists.” She directed her next question to Callie, “Did you know she’s best friend with Massachusetts’s Chief Medical Examiner?”

“Fancy.”

Her wife agreed. “I bet she got you to go to an opera.” Jane started to wilt. “Ballet?” Further. “A symphony.”

“Chopin is actually kind of cool.”

Arizona was stunned. “Seriously?”

Callie was going to work on the assumption that like her wife Jane wasn’t crazy about the majority of classical music. Arizona was a big fan of a couple of Russian composers but trying to get her into a concert hall or theater was like doing traction without anesthesia. 

“Sounds like your friend is pretty cultured.”

“You’d probably love her Callie. You two could talk about…Borodin.” Arizona’s go to for sounding like she knew more than what one learned in elementary school music class. Though he wasn’t her favorite because of his music. She just liked him because he was also a kick ass chemist.

Shaking her head in amusement Callie patted her wife on the knee, “Come on Arizona. We’ve got to get to the hospital.” 

She looked to see if Jane was following but the cop was still at the counter drinking her coffee. Realizing Callie was waiting for her she spoke up, “I’ve actually got to go in and talk with Williams this morning. But I’ll call you both when I’m done.”

“Lock the door on your way out.”

  


####

“Dude you were in an explosion?”

Alex said it loud enough that half the kids in the Peds ward heard him.

Arizona handed the chart she’d been browsing off to the startled nurse and tried to look nonchalant. Like Alex hadn’t just said what he’s said and like her ears weren’t still ringing from the night before.

“Is Lexie on my service today? Or just you?”

“Me and Kepner. Who said you were in an explosion. They were talking about it down in Radiology.”

“Sort of.”

“Why are you here? Why aren’t you all crispy and dead or something or at least sleeping it off?”

“Because I wasn’t at the epicenter and Callie and the EMTs both cleared me.”

He stepped into her personal space and peered intently at her eyes. 

“Karev, what the hell are you doing?”

“You and I are on a seven hour surgery that I need for my boards. I don’t want you scrubbing in if your brain is mush.”

“My brain is fine.”

“Did you get a neuro consult.”

Okay he’d gone from kind of charming in a rough way to irritating. “Karev, go prep the patient and stop worrying about my brain.” He reached up to hold peel her eyelids back or something and she slapped his hand away. “Now.”

“Can we get it on record that you were in an explosion if something goes wrong?”

She narrowed her eyes and he shrugged. He had to try. She would have done the same years ago.

  


####

“It’s just a test.”

Arizona shot her a withering gaze. “These are my boards. Imagine your detective’s exam. Multiply by a million.”

Jane laughed and snaked an arm out to wrap around Arizona’s waist and tugged her into her lap. “You’ll do fine.” She kissed her fiancé on the nose.

“John Hopkins **and** Seattle Grace are both really interested in me for their fellowships. Which I can’t get if I fail my boards.”

“Aren’t those places not…here?”

“Of course they aren’t. Mass Gen has a great general program. I mean, it’s Harper Avery. Of course it’s amazing. But Children’s fellowship program is nearly impossible to get into and they’re still kind of pissed at me for what happened with Hamilton Gregg.”

Jane rolled her eyes. “That was almost three years ago.”

“I nearly got fired from my residency. **You** nearly lost your job.”

Left unsaid was that Arizona had nearly lost her life. It was over a month before she could be back in the OR again and she’d been intolerably cranky about it.

“You should apply at Children’s. The nurses all love you, you’re always home late because you’re rocking amazing surgeries, and **you** were the resident they sent to India for that conjoined twin surgery. They want you.”

“They don’t want me.”

Jane nipped at her nose, “ **I** want you.”

Arizona grinned and kissed her, “Mm, that helps.”

  


####

“Maura?”

She started at the sound of her name and stood up from the couch, stepping in front of her work and praying Angela didn’t get curious because then she would have to answer her and it would be uncomfortable.

“It’s six in the morning. Did you go to sleep?”

“I did.” She did not.

Angela didn’t believe her. She craned her neck to see what was on the coffee table. “What are you working on?”

“Something for work.”

Angela came closer. Saw the map. “That’s Riverway.” Her eyes narrowed. “Maura. What are you doing?”

“Research. For work.”

“This looks like you’re looking into Hamilton Gregg.”

She threw up her hands, “Well can you blame me! Jane was convinced this man was a murderer. So was her girlfriend. As far as I know they’re both very smart women not prone to delusions. So there has to be something here.”

“All three of you are prone to delusions,” Angela said flatly.

She motioned to some photos that made Jane’s mother blanche, “I was looking over the coroner reports and the reports filed by Dr. Robbins after admitting each girl. There could be something here.”

“ **Could** being the operative word. Jane and Arizona nearly lost their jobs and their lives chasing after this creep Maura. And now Jane’s putting herself through hell doing sleepovers at that woman’s house because of this. It’s not worth it. He isn’t.”

Maura very much disagreed. She snatched up Gregg’s arrest report and waved it in front of Angela. “But currently he’s just wanted for skipping bail. If he murdered and kidnapped these girls, which is appearing more and more plausible, then he should be in jail for life. He can be in jail and Jane can come home and we can all put this behind us.”

Angela frowned.

Maura realized only after she’d said it—it was plausible he’d killed. She’d thought it while looking over the evidence but she’d also internalized those suspicions. A good investigator could not function on “gut” alone. It was what put Jane in the very precarious position she currently existed in.

But it wasn’t just gut. It was Jane’s gut. Jane who—while prone to flights of very unprofessional fancy—was very rarely ever wrong. She’d nearly thrown away her career and almost gotten a woman killed because she was so dead certain that Hamilton Gregg was a killer.

And her certainty was never enough for Maura.

Or at least it hadn’t been before.

“You really think he did this?”

Did she? She had the reports of medical examiners. Reports from the doctor who treated each girl. A wealth of circumstantial evidence. Gregg’s interest in the case, coupled with his home’s proximity to the pit was enticing. How he’d reacted to Arizona Robbins’ accusation was also suspect.

The fact that the abductions and deaths had stopped completely after his arrest? All but damning.

But that wasn’t proof. Presented as reasons for conviction the paltry evidence Jane had previously collected was awful. Less than worthy of the court’s time.

But the last eight years had seen extraordinary leaps forward in certain areas of investigation. Specifically records. Where once sifting through records require Dramamine and infinite patience now it was simply a matter of forming the right query and inserting it into a field provided by the search engine.

“A girl in Gregg’s neighborhood disappeared when he was sixteen. If we could somehow find her. Or her remains. If she was killed and in a similar manner…“

“Like in Silence of the Lambs right? It would prove he had a—“ Angela tried to form the words with her hands, “A history.”

“Exactly.”

“Jane loved that movie when she was younger,” Angela added.

“It is quite good. Much more realistic than some other films of the genre.” 

“So how are you gonna find this missing girl?”

That would be difficult. It would involve creating a timeline of events leading up to her disappearance. Both for herself and Gregg. The latter would be the most difficult. He was never considered a suspect in the original disappearance.

And if Maura drew attention to him. If it appeared that she was pursuing him as a suspect with nothing beyond circumstantial evidence and a desire to prove Jane’s gut feelings right—it would be disastrous to her career.

But leaving it all alone could end up being disastrous to Jane’s.

  


####

That look Williams gave her when he saw her? That was a look she was familiar with. It was one she’d given many a suspect, friend and irksome acquaintance. He might have groaned in annoyance too but she was far enough away that she couldn’t hear him.

He was on the phone and held up a hand to keep her in place. She wasted the next few minutes browsing the photos and accolades on the walls around the room. William’s department seemed to have a solid reputation and judging by what she was seeing he wasn’t a slouch.

Five minutes later he approached her with a grimace. “Something I can do for you detective?”

The use of her title was a sign of respect and one indicating that though he’d vaguely accused her of attempting to murder a child and blowing up a woman he, perhaps, didn’t buy his own theory.

“I was just seeing if you’d heard anything back about Cle Elum.”

“Seriously? I tell you you’re a suspect and twelve hours later you’re here looking for information.”

“I came out here to find this guy Williams. Sitting in Arizona’s fancy apartment twiddling my thumbs is gonna drive me crazy.”

“Better than a cell.”

She raised an eyebrow, “You’re really going to put me in jail?”

“Greggs is a ghost. I’ve got no evidence of him being in Seattle or even Washington. You, on the other hand, flew into town and a few days later his internet girlfriend is dead and there’s a girl in the hospital suffering from an attack similar to one you were reportedly obsessed with. That’s all circumstantial but it wouldn’t be very hard to take it to a place where we hold you for questioning.”

As he’d gone on his tone had turned more strident and Jane stepped close—her playful mood evaporated. “So hold me for questioning.”

Williams was shorter that Jane and had to glance up to look her in the eyes. “I’m trying to help you here. You should go back to that apartment.”

“This guy put my ex-fiancee in the hospital once. Broke her ribs, her collarbone and turned her face to mash. Yesterday he figured out we were looking for him and murdered a woman and tried to murder us with her. He kidnapped that poor girl and sent her to Arizona’s hospital as a message. He’s stalking her. Hunting her. And you’re asking me to just sit and wait until the explosive device is in Arizona’s kitchen or until he figures out a way to sneak into her hospital and murder her.” She moved in so close he had to crane his neck to look at her. “I’m not doing that.”

He studied her. Considered something. Then stepped back. The tension ebbed away. “Those murders you suspected him of. You ever solve them?”

She frowned.

“Because maybe you could have your friends back in Boston reopen the case. See if there’s anything new.”

“That’s not poss…” She trailed off. Maybe it was? Maybe Korsak could look into it. Bring in Frost. They would keep it quiet and they weren’t Jane so they wouldn’t have to worry about getting fired just by looking at the case.

Williams’ misinterpreted her silence. “That’s all I can offer you,” he said in an attempt to console her. “I wish there was more.”

She thanked him and headed outside where she called Korsak. “How’s the old ball and chain,” he asked.

“Married with a daughter. Gregg murdered that women he was talking to out here.”

There was silence on the line as he processed what she said. When he spoke it was with that paternal concern he sometimes allowed to peek through, “Are **you** okay?”

“I was in an explosion. Rung my bell butt good, but I’m okay. We both are.”

“I don’t like it. I don’t like you out there all alone with this guy and her.”

What was implied was the lack of trust she should place in Arizona. Because once upon a time she ran.

“How’s Maura doing?” It was easier to change the subject—even if that new subject was nearly as painful as the old one.

“She seems good. O’Doyle’s been transferred and her mom is out of the hospital and recuperating overseas.”

“Good.” It was good. Maura had refused to speak to her but watching her best friend wear herself down had been heartbreaking. 

“She’s doing some work under the radar though. Leaving early and taking lunch breaks that would make the flatfoots envious.”

“Something wrong?”

She could hear his shrug over the phone, “Don’t know. She’s got us working with that turd while she disappears to do whatever she’s been doing.”

“Think it’s to do with O’Doyle?” They didn’t call him Maura’s father. He might have been biologically, but he was also one of the most evil men on the East Coast. An unapologetic murder who was separated from demons like Gregg only by the minute amount of empathy he’d managed to maintain.

“I don’t think so. She’s talked to your mom about it though.”

That was the **worst** thing Maura could do. Jane sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. This was just what she needed. Her mom and her best friend playing detective a world away.

“Pull Frankie in will ya? See if he can snoop around and find out what they’re up to.”

“Already on it. You stay safe out there Jane.”

She’d try.

  


####

A shadow was cast over their table and Arizona paused mid daring story of saving a five year old to look up. It was the man. The one they’d gone to speak to. The one that had terrified her girlfriend. 

Jane felt protective all of a sudden and reached beneath the table to take Arizona’s hand in her own. 

He smiled. And it was a nice smile. He was a good looking guy. Almost model good looking. But his eyes were off just a hair. Like those of a puppet. Glassy yet focused. 

“Dr. Robbins right?”

Arizona nodded mutely.

He turned his eyes to Jane. The hair on the back of her neck rose. 

“And you’re the friend.”

“Jane,” she offered. Not her last name. If he didn’t remember it she didn’t really want to remind him.

“Jane. Right.” It was an attempt at social grace. An attempt to make it seem like he cared. Then he was back on Arizona with that smile just a shade short of charming. “I saw you over there and I was just wondering. Are you free? For dinner sometime.”

She was absolutely not.

Beneath the table Arizona squeezed Jane’s hand and that mask of hers dropped into place. Arizona could be pleasant and kind. She had a gift for making a person feel like they were the only person in the world and she often hid behind that gift. Used it to distance herself from patients. Had even busted it out once or twice with Jane’s parents.

“Sure,” and her smile was so charming it was easy for someone less familiar to assume it was genuine. “Give me a call?”

He pulled out a business card, “How about you call me,” a glance so quick Jane nearly missed his eyes on her, “when you’re free.”

Arizona accepted the card and studied it like she was interested. “Will do Hamilton.”

She said his name so flirtatiously that Jane felt a pang of irrational jealousy. 

When he was gone Jane pulled her hand away. “Want to explain what that was? Because it looked like you just accepted a date while out having coffee with your girlfriend.”

Arizona held the card up between two fingers, “That’s called police work Officer Rizzoli.”

Jane felt her jaw drop. It might have hit the table.

“Scored the digits of the serial killer and have an in into his place that doesn’t require a warrant. Jealous?”

“You’re insane.” Really, really insane. They could be killed. But, “And I kind of love you for it.”

She shrugged smugly, “Because I’m awesome.”

Setting up an undercover operation with your girlfriend probably wasn’t what a good cop would do, and Korsak was already irritated with her for finding the pit in her off hours. But the police force was stalled in their investigation and her girlfriend had just gotten their very best lead.

“Looks like we’re going to have to get you a wire.”

Her eyes brightened, “Do I get a gun?”

She was so cute with her curiosity, and anyway one looked at it Jane was in a world of trouble.

  


####

Fight or flight. Those were the urges one felt in moments of intense fear. Some tensed up. Some ran. Some stood their ground.

Callie was a fighter. Her wife? Her wife was a runner. They were at odds in those most extreme moments and once upon a time it had saved their lives. Arizona had run. Cast herself over the body of a child and disappeared into an endless declaration.

“There are only children here.”

That plaintive proclamation stuck in Callie’s head.

But Callie. Callie fought. She stood. She faced down a man that had murdered her coworkers and shot her friends. She still remembered the stillness of his hand. The murder glinting in his eyes. The calm matter of fact way he wielded death. And she still remembered how her own hands shook.

Callie was a fighter—but not without fear.

And it was fear that ran like a shock through her. Gregg was…Gregg was in the hospital. Smiling and talking to a child and acting like he belonged there. She couldn’t move. He looked up. Noticed her. Winked.

And Callie—who never ran—ran. She had to find Arizona. And she didn’t go far. She was just out of sight of Gregg when she physically slammed into her wife who reached out to catch her.

“Hey,” she said laughingly, “where’s the fire?”

“He’s here.”

It was an instant shift in Arizona. The smile dropped off her face and her eyes turned hard. She started back in the direction Callie had come from.

“We need to call the police.”

“Where is he?”

She pointed towards the room he was in. Arizona crept close. Callie’s blood was loud in her ears. Closer. Why weren’t they doing something? Why weren’t they contacting someone?

Too close.

Only—Arizona visibly relaxed.

“Callie,” she said calmly. She held out her hand. It was as still and relaxed as she was. “Come here.”

Callie took the offered hand and was pulled close. 

“That,” her wife said in a low voice, “is Mr. Taylor. Talking with his daughter. He’s been coming in for a month and I can safely say he is not Hamilton Gregg.”

She remembered the violent fear that had struck her when she first saw him. How he seemed like a hunter. Unnerving. “But he’s so creepy. He looks at me like I’m a hamburger.” 

“Because he’s seen you down here a few times and has fallen madly in love. He’s asked me twice if you were seeing anyone.”

“You didn’t tell him you’re married to me?”

Arizona kissed her on the cheek, “He gets all happy and hungry when he sees you. I wasn’t going to ruin that.”

“Cute.” Deflated Callie leaned back against the wall. “I hate this.”

The sudden shift sobered Arizona immediately.

“This guy is just out there. Waiting.” Still leaning against the wall she turned her head to look at Arizona, “Why aren’t you more scared?”

“I’m terrified,” she admitted softly.

“Because you were pretty hardcore just now when you though it was him in there.”

Arizona’s eyes were sharp in the shadows of the hallway. They took all of Callie in. “You know how you always protect me? You’re always looking out for me and I feel like I never get the chance to do the same.”

“George? My parents? Arizona all you do is help me.”

She looked away, “Dead ex-husbands and your crappy mom are one thing. This guy terrifies you and he **should** but I know him. Better than a lot of people and that means **I** can protect **you**.”

Callie reached out and ran her hand down the sleeve of Arizona’s coat. Her fingers traced the bones of Arizona’s hand before taking it in her own. “We’re in this together. Remember?”

Arizona squeezed her hand. 

“Together.”

  


####

Gregg had owned his house outright and while he’d been in prison it had sat empty less that a mile from Riverway. It was still empty and Maura, though usually not a very self-conscious woman, felt a little nervous walking up the steps. The windows had been shuttered but the grass was freshly cut.

Most of the houses in the neighborhood were so large they’d been converted to apartments. Not Gregg’s. It was as large as the houses around it, but seemed to loom over them. The paint was peeling and the what had once been a light blue had yellowed and greened in time and was a murky gray on its way to brown.

It was an eye sore.

“The whacko’s not home.”

The sound of the voice, a strong accent found only in Boston, startled Maura. She spun on her heels and found a younger woman with a dog standing directly behind her.

“Excuse me?”

“He hasn’t been home in weeks.”

That Maura already knew.

“Did you know him?”

The woman shook her head, “No way. He was creepy you know? Stared at you. I’m not a feminist or anything but he looked like he kind of hated woman. Guys he was better with.”

Maura resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She’d hardly been a women’s studies major, but people who disavowed feminism annoyed her. Besides, she needed to stay focused. “But you saw him? Before he left?”

“Sure. Just being wicked crazy. I know not joking when I say he hated women. He’d make these comments you know? Like a serial killer or something. Even my dog was wigged out by him.”

Her dog was currently attempting to shove her nose up Maura’s skirt. She stepped out just past the length of the dog’s leash.

“I bet he’s off stalking his girlfriend.”

Maura cocked her head to the side, “Girlfriend?”

“Yeah. He was dating some girl. Told my brother one morning when they ended up walking from the grocery store together. Named after a spaceship or something.”

Or a battleship. 

“Thank you” she said sincerely. Gregg was dating Arizona Robbins? No. More likely he was mad and assumed he was dating her. More than one woman had been killed in a violent domestic situation spun from a man’s misunderstanding of relationships.

She pulled her phone out. Jane needed to know. Even though she was mad at Jane. Furious. She hated Jane and she had to remind herself of that.

That was false.

She didn’t hate Jane. She was incapable of hating Jane. She loved Jane.

She was just furious.

Her thumb hit the Send button.

“Rizzoli,” Jane said. Her voice was scratchy. Familiar. She’d forgotten the sound of it outside of voicemails.

“Jane?”

“Maura!” Did she detected…joy? Perhaps being away from one another had actually soothed the frayed edges of their friendship.

“Yes. How’s Seattle?”

“Wet. I was just,” she grunted, “Picking up dinner. Arizona and her wife have me helping around the house to earn my keep. How’s Boston?”

It has rained that morning. The ground was still damp. “Wet,” she said with a ghost of a smile.

Over the phone she heard keys rattle in a door. She could see Jane standing outside some stylish Seattle home balancing a bag full of ready made salad and frozen lasagna on her hip as she tried to get the door open. 

“I was calling about your case.”

“I’m not working right now Maura. Frost and Korsak have my cases.”

“I mean your old one.”

Silence over the line.

“Your mother and Sergeant Korsak gave me the details and I’ve been doing some follow up inquiries.”

Jane started muttering to herself, a habit the preceded a stern lecture nine times out of ten. “Is this what you and my mom have been doing?”

“She’s just been advising. I would never put her in danger.”

“Her mouth puts her in danger—“

“He thinks he’s dating your friend Jane.” Maura managed to not add any odd inflection to the word “friend” and she was quite proud of herself for that.

There was a loud noise. Jane must have dropped the groceries. She was quiet a moment. No doubt absorbing this news.

“Maura,” she said softly.

“Yes Jane.”

“I’m really glad you called.” Her tone was tender. Affectionate. Warmth over the phone that soothed Maura in ways she’d could never have anticipated. “I have to go though,” she continued, “Keep—keep safe will ya?” Jane was a worry wart. It wasn’t unusual for her to say something like that. But she also liked to talk about things. If Maura made a mistake Jane delighted in dragging her through the mud until she’d made up for it. Such a quick dismissal of what was certainly their most vicious fight was unusual.

“Jane?” 

But there was only dead air. Jane was gone. And now Maura had an unsettling feeling in her stomach. She put her palm over it and grimaced. Everything was fine right? Yet in her gut, her most untrustworthy organ, everything felt wrong.

  


####

He was just standing there. Waiting. And Jane was fast. Faster than a lot of cops, but her gun was in her purse not her holster and she was carrying a bag of groceries. He slammed into her. She screamed. Noise was good. Noise meant you were alive. Noise brought help.

He got the gun first though. And he rounded on her with it and she froze.

“Not a word.”

He motioned for her to stand. They walked back into the apartment. He kicked her bag and groceries inside.

The gun pointed to one of the stools at the bar.

“Have a seat. We’re going to be here a while.”

  


####

Callie found Arizona still in scrubs and tucking her hair into her scrub cap. Arizona caught her eye in the mirror, “Sorry. They just paged me. We’re prepping a kid for emergency surgery.”

Which meant Callie was walking home alone. Mark had already headed back with Sofia. They were doing dinner at their place with Julie and attempting to avoid the, “festering drama” in Callie and Arizona’s apartment.

“You and Jane going to be okay?”

“Sure. Who doesn’t love half an evening with your wife’s ex?”

“I don’t know. Mark can be pretty fun sometimes.”

Touche. 

She kissed her wife goodbye and crossed the street. A couple of hours with Jane Rizzoli. She could feel the joy.

In the hallway she paused. There was music coming from Mark’s place. Jazz. He’d better not be sexing up his girlfriend while Sofia napped.

There was also a single cherry tomato in the center of the hallway.

Yeah, she really didn’t want to know what Mark and Julie were getting up to.

She slid the key into the lock of her own apartment and pushed the door open with her shoulder. The lights were dim.

“Run.”

It was so low she almost didn’t here it. Soft and pleading. There was a rasp to it.

Her eyes adjusted to the low light. Jane was standing there and her eyes were wide open and terrified. Her mouth tight in a grimace. That was where the command had come from. And it was there on her face too. Telling Callie to run.

There was a man too. How odd. She accepted his presence with ease. It was so natural. He was taller than Jane and had his arm around her waist. Callie couldn’t see her hands, they were behind her back.

But the man’s hands she could see. The one around her waist. It was holding a gun. Right. A gun. Perfectly normal. 

No.

Not so normal.

And the knife. His other hand was holding a knife up to Jane’s neck. That was why she was rasping. Callie kept her knives razor sharp. If she shouted she might cut her self.

The man frowned.

“You’re not her.”

Such a normal voice. So matter of fact. So devoid of emotions beyond juvenile disappointment. Why didn’t murderers ever sound as evil as they clearly were?

“Run.”

Almost louder. Not enough.

Callie couldn’t run. Callie Torres wouldn’t run. But she couldn’t fight. Not this time. 

So she stood stock still.

And then there was the familiar scent of blood. It filled her nostrils. And there was red. There was red everywhere.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all the kudos and feedback. Love is always appreciated. :D
> 
> Also this may need mentioning. This story takes place before the last three episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. Clearly, as Arizona is not walking around going “argh my knee” in a George C Scott being hit in the groin with a football voice. That also means no Nick.

The immediate danger when a carotid artery was cut was that blood flow to the brain would be impeded and the patient would have a stroke. Strokes were fickle ailments. They could do little more than cause temporary slurring or they could be so devastating that they put the patient in a vegetative state.

They weren’t something you gambled with.

So when a carotid artery was cut the goal of the doctor was to keep the person from bleeding out and restore blood flow to the brain.

In an OR with instruments and machines and a staff of highly trained nurses and medical personnel. 

In Callie’s kitchen her only focus was stopping the blood. It was hot in her hands and the smell made the room reek. Which was odd. She was accustomed to the smell of blood. Like burnt flesh and exposed marrow it wasn’t something that usually bothered her.

But it had never been in her home. Every where. 

The man let Jane drop and she’d sort of spun in a pirouette like a dancer— spraying a geyser of blood across the room and onto Callie. It was only the taste of it in her mouth that pulled her out of her shock. Then she was moving towards Jane and forgetting all about the man, who dropped his knife and disappeared out the door as casually as if he’d just stopped by for sugar.

Jane tried feebly to reach up to touch her wound but Callie easily pushed her away with an elbow. She could feel the woman’s blood soaking through the knees of her pants.

Damn it. There was so much.

Jane was watching her and trying to speak but there was only more blood.

No. 

No, she was trying to breathe. Her trachea had likely been injured.

A shadow at the door and then Mark was kneeling next to her. Had he heard the cut? It was so loud in her head. The sound of a knife slicing through muscle and tendon and veins. Louder than a gunshot.

“Good girl Callie.” 

He was assessing her work. She didn’t think it was exactly worthy of praise. She’d just stuck her hand against the wound and done everything in her power to keep more blood from leaking out around her fingers.

“Call an ambulance.”

Mark was in control. Calm. She felt his hand on her cheek.

“You’re doing fine Callie.”

No, she wasn’t. This was Arizona’s ex-fiancee and she was bleeding on their floor.

“You can clean the floor.”

Wait. She blinked. The world shrunk down. Back to normal. The blood on her hands wasn’t quite so hot—only sticky. The smell was now not so pungent. Everything was suddenly a little duller.

“Was I babbling,” she asked.

Mark nodded. Julia returned with a phone and a surgical kit. Mark used the penlight from it to examine the wound. He started muttering to himself and relaying details to Julia who relayed them to the ambulance dispatch.

Something wet and light glanced off Callie’s hand and her eyes darted down to meet Jane’s. “Don’t talk.” Jane wasn’t trying to. Only trying to breathe. “We’ve got Mark Sloan on the case okay? He’s the best there is. Having him across the hall? It’s like having Arizona across the hall when a kid gets sick okay? There’s no one better.”

Jane’s eyes were wide and watchful. Not quite terrified. Glassy.

“Just…stay alive okay?”

But how could you? The artery pulsed against Callie’s fingers. Jane grew paler. Gray. Mark was sterilizing a tube to insert in Jane’s neck to help with breathing. Julia was there with a compression bandage to apply to the wound. It wouldn’t help.

Nothing could.

“Stay alive.”

  


####

“Are you sure about this?”

“Going on a date with a potential sociopath? Who is straight? And a guy? What’s not to be sure about?”

Jane’s girlfriend’s bravado was ridiculously cute. She tugged her forward by the lapels of her jacket and kissed her on the lips. 

“I’m serious.”

Arizona’s hands were warm as they covered Jane’s. “I am too.” She stopped and looked up. “Well, I mean about the super confidence and being able to do this part. I’m definitely nervous about the going on a date with a straight male sociopath part because, you know, yikes.”

Jane tapped the mic pack taped to the small of Arizona’s back. “So don’t let him touch this okay?”

“If his hands get anywhere near there—“

“But be polite. Playful.”

She got a coy smile for that one.

“And **be careful**.”

Arizona was impatient to get out of the car and head off for her date. She gave Jane a peck on the lips and slipped out of the ancient Corolla Jane’s parents had loaned them for their “date.”

“Officer Hot Pants? This is Doctor Sexy Sunshine. I’m going in.”

She rolled her eyes. Of course Arizona would be talking to her microphone.

“Ooo he picked a nice place.”

And talking to herself.

“I’m talking to myself. I mean. I look like I am. You can’t see it Jane but I’m doing a really good job of not moving my lips while looking for him.”

A hostess asked Arizona a question that sounded suspiciously like “Are you okay.”

“And now the wait staff things I’m drunk. Going silent Hot Pants. See you in a few.”

Her girlfriend was definitely going to get them killed.

  


####

A surgeon got accustomed to blood very quickly or they didn’t last long as a surgeon. They saw it in the OR and they got used to seeing it covering people who stood in the halls of the surgical floor. Because sometimes accidents did happen.

But those people were in scrubs and surgical gowns and usually looked perfectly healthy—if a bit irritated about being covered in another person’s fluid.

Callie didn’t look healthy. She was pale with shock. And the blood that covered her was soaked into the knees of her jeans and covered her shirt and face like a fine mist. It covered her hands too. Like she’d been finger-painting in another person’s ichor.

Seeing her wife covered in blood and looking lost in a place she’d worked in for nearly ten years was so alarming that for a moment the image didn’t even make sense. Beside her Alex exhaled sharply. “Woah.”

She called her wife’s name. Loud and strong. And Callie heard her. She looked down the length of the hall. She was incapable of speech. Not quite shaking. Arizona’s feet started moving, pounding against the tile. Alex was right beside her.

Callie spoked as soon as Arizona was within earshot. “It’s not mine.” A preemptive strike. 

Arizona, not quite believing her, looked her over for signs of wounds.

“Did you trip and fall on some plasma,” Alex asked.

She ignored him and directed her attention to Arizona. “He was there. When I got back. He was there just—holding her. And then he cut her and ran and I tried.”

The words, like the image before her, took a moment to sink in. Then everything started to fall into place. “Jane?”

Callie nodded. She must have cried at some point because the splash of dried blood on her face was smudged, looking more like dark swirls of watercolors. “Mark heard me. He’s in surgery with her now.”

The urge to rush into the room and learn everything she could was so potent Arizona felt her whole body shift. But as quick as the urge took her it disappeared. Callie was shivering, the shock replacing the adrenaline that had no doubt carried her from the hospital.

Arizona took her wife’s hands in her own. The blood hadn’t dried and was sticky between them. But she couldn’t think about that. Or about the woman Mark was fighting to save. She had to think about Callie, who’d come home to a murderer. 

“Alex,” she said, still looking at Callie, “I need to get her cleaned up can you go see if the cops are here yet?”

They’d be looking for Callie. They’d need to take photos of her current state and bag her clothes for evidence. Just to rule her out as the attacker.

The beat of rubber souls on tile told her Alex was doing as she asked.

“Are you okay?”

Callie nodded stiffly. “Julia has Sofia. She’s down in the pit with Lexie and Cristina.”

“Good,” she said softly. Keeping their daughter in a very public place with easy access to security would keep her safe.

“He didn’t even care,” Callie almost whispered, “Just pulled the knife across her throat.”

She closed her eyes. It was a mistake. Unbidden the image came up. Hamilton Gregg probably didn’t even smile as he tried to kill Jane. Just dragged the knife across her throat like he was slicing a fish.

  


####

“He likes me Jane. And not in a sort of adorable way. He likes me in the make a suit out of my skin way.”

“He is seriously creepy.”

No. Unsettling. Arizona worked in a hospital. Like every doctor she’d done her rotations in psych and she’d met some well and truly insane people. But Hamilton Gregg was something wholly more terrifying.

Jane came around and rubbed her arms to warm her up. “You did good special deputy.”

She glared at her.

“And you’ll surely help us catch the bad guy.” Jane had adopted a Texas twang that was totally at odds with her soft Boston lilt. 

Arizona punched her in the arm. “Stop that.”

Jane tipped an imaginary hat. “Yes ma’am.”

  


####

Williams looked startled when he stepped in the room. He took in Arizona, still in her cap and gown, and Callie, still covered in blood.

“I was in surgery,” Arizona said. She wasn’t at home. She wasn’t responsible and nor was Jane. Williams’ silly assertion that they were suspects was a wash now.

He seemed conciliatory. “Dr. Torres would you liked to get cleaned up first?”

That was a surprise. Didn’t he need to collect Callie’s clothes and take photos before she washed away any potential evidence?

“CCTV at your building picked up Gregg entering and leaving. Dead to rights,” he explained.

Beside her Callie exhaled shakily. She was still operating on adrenaline. There was only a tiny tremor in her hands to suggest she wasn’t catatonic from shock.

“Get cleaned up,” he continued, “and we’ll talk afterwards.”

Callie spoke up, her voice strong, “You’re looking for him right?”

Willaims nodded. “We are.”

“Because before you were thinking my wife and Jane were the suspects and now her blood is on our floor. It wouldn’t have been—“

He quickly interrupted her, “I realize we were too cautious for your taste Ms. Torres. But we are looking for him.”

“It’s **Doctor** Torres, and if you don’t want me and a very pricy brigade of lawyers on your doorstep you’ll have a cop on my family for the foreseeable future.”

He raised an eye. Arizona bit her lip. The adrenaline was apparently still going strong.

“I’ll have someone assigned immediately.”

  


####

Jane collapsed onto the grass and took deep breaths. She panted and motioned at Maura who was still jogging place to keep her heart rate up. “Would you sit down?”

“We’re not done yet.”

“It’s ninety degrees outside and I can feel the acid in my stomach. We’re done.”

Maura jogged closer. “You’re feeling nauseous?”

“I’m feeling like I’m gonna hurl all over your stupid toe shoes.”

They really did need to keep their heart rates up, but it was also Jane’s first attempt at running since she shot herself to stop a suspect. Pushing her too hard, especially when she was complaining of stomach pains, wouldn’t be wise.

Maura knelt next to her friend and reached for the hem of her shirt. 

“Any sharp pains in you abdomen?”

Jane swatted her hand away, “No just in my ass—stop that!”

“I’m just trying to be thorough Jane. Your abdominal wall is very weak at the moment.”

Jane waved lazily in acknowledgement. Then took another deep breath.

“And you really should breathe through your nose. It’s much more productive then through your mouth.”

Jane groaned. “God you nag more then my mother.”

Well that was just— “I **do** not.” Though she was asserting herself much more than she had before the shooting. Nearly losing her best friend had been devastating and as far as Maura was concerned it would only happen once. Never again, and certainly not because Jane damaged **herself**.

She cracked open and eye and peered at Maura. Her lips curled into a smile. “You do a little.” She closed her eyes. “But it’s okay when you do it.”

  


####

She prided herself on how she handled shock. Some people were prone to PTSD. Some people had night terrors. Some people cried. Some laughed. Some were as still as death itself. Everyone dealt with extreme emotional stress in their own way and Callie had always been secretly a little happy with how handled it all.

She processed healthily and moved on. Even in the moment her brain worked just fine. It was one of those talents that made her hell on wheels in a surgery and it was why she was the go-to ortho specialist in trauma situations. She moved fast and well.

But that ability to process meant she could step out of a situation, and in this particular case she was stepping away from her own situation to analyze her grasp of it. Because in the apartment she’d panicked—she’d succumbed to tunnel vision and ranted like a crazy person. Callie didn’t rant…unless declarations of love were involved.

The door to the shower room slammed shut and involuntarily she shuddered. Naked and vulnerable in the shower was about the worst way to be caught by a serial killer or whatever he was. It was why Hitchcock did it in Psycho. 

And what a way to go. The residents would definitely make Psycho jokes if she died that way. Lots of “ri ri ri” and knife slashing moments and probably a crack about getting killed by a crazy dude in his mom’s dress. Hopefully after a considerable amount of mourning.

But the feet on the other side of the curtain were too tiny for six feet of very attractive psycho man.

As quick as the adrenaline surged it dissipated. She sighed, ducked her head and turned off the shower.

“Callie?”

Arizona sounded worried enough for both of them. She couldn’t see Callie, the curtain was between them, but her concern was very present in her tone.

“I got you some scrubs and shoes. No socks though. There weren’t any in your locker and I’m wearing the pair I had in mine. I can get you some sandals if you want? Or make one of the residents give you their socks. Though they all have tiny ant like feet or are Karev and Avery who don’t understand what doing laundry means.”

Callie wrapped the thin hospital issued towel around her midsection and pulled the curtain back. Her wife looked almost childlike standing there with a bundle of clothes clutched to her chest. She was still wearing her surgical gown and it always seemed to dwarf her figure. But it was her eyes. Wide and scared—for Callie? Jane? Just in general.

“I can go without socks.”

“Williams is already working with Owen on arranging security here at the hospital. And Sofia is—“ her smile was a struggle— “she’s good. She’s fine.” She frowned. “I don’t know about Jane though. I should check on her right?”

She pulled the scrub top out of the pile of clothes Arizona was holding and drew it over her head. Sometimes it was better to let Arizona rant. She so rarely processed things verbally that Callie liked to just let her go when she did.

“I should. Definitely. But I can’t Callie. Because you were there and the idea of letting you out of my sight rips me apart.”

The scrub bottoms were forgotten in Callie’s hands. She looked up sharply. Arizona’s rant had reached a turning point. The moment of finality they always seemed to hit when uninterrupted. Which was never, ever good.

“You were there.” Arizona said—as if in awe. “I came close to losing you before. I can’t—I can’t do it again. I won’t.”

She looked so resolute, even swimming in her surgical gown and holding a pair of tennis shoes. But…she was near tears. Agonizing over whatever thoughts were lurking in that head of hers. Unbidden Callie found herself once more standing in an airport feeling the world fall away.

“What are you saying?” She angrily pulled on her pants but she tried to guard her tone—to sound even when inside everything was a mess. Arizona couldn’t be—she wouldn’t leave Callie. She wouldn’t be stupid or cruel enough. Not now. Not after everything they’d been through.

She wouldn’t run away again.

“I can’t lose you Callie.” She nodded firmly. “You can never leave.” 

Relief wanted Callie to collapse, but her wife’s naked need kept her standing—strong. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“After Tim? And now Jane?” She shook her head. “I can’t lose you too.”

Callie reached up to put a hand on her wife’s shoulder. “Hey.” She squeezed. “I’m not going anywhere,” she reiterated.

Arizona didn’t cry. Not in public. There was her weird authority thing. And that second time they’d broken up. But usually she was a stalwart little soldier.

“I can’t…” Her voice was barely a whisper. The tears bright tracks on her skin.

Callie stepped close and drew the tears away with her thumb. Arizona was shaking with Callie so close and still nodding to herself. Callie wrapped her up in her arms and pressed her lips hard to her temple. She could be stalwart too. All the blood had washed away and with it much of the shock. So she could be strong when Arizona could not.

That’s how a marriage worked.

  


####

Arizona shuffled into the apartment like a zombie and collapsed onto the bed fully dressed. Jane cracked open an eyelid.

“You look like crap.”

Something was muttered into the pillow. Sounded like “I feel like crap.”

“What happened,” she asked sleepily. She didn’t really want to know. She wanted to sleep. So she kept her eyes closed but put a hand on Arizona’s shoulder to let her know she was there in spirit if not alertness. 

“Another girl.”

That woke her up.

“She was in the best shape yet.”

“Funny way for a serial killer to escalate.” They usually grew more violent and deadly. Not less so. This guy put girls in a pit. He’d had months to perfect his system.

“She was kidnapped the day before we met with Gregg.”

And let go two days after his first official date with Arizona.

Arizona rolled over onto her back. “Do you think—what if dating me is making him better?”

Her girlfriend, ever the optimist.

“Could be.”

“I sense a major but.” She slapped Jane’s ass for good measure.

“Or he’s just making room.”

Silence. Jane pushed herself up to look at Arizona, who was angelic in nothing but the moonlight. But pensive. Her mouth pursed in something between pensiveness and horror.

“For me,” she asked softly.

She could have comforted Arizona then, but what was the point? They’d done this themselves. Enchanted a mad man. And done it far too well.

  


####

“You really are doing it,” Frankie cried.

Maura jumped approximately two feet off the couch. She’d been deep in her research and hadn’t actually noticed his entrance. She knew someone was there besides herself and Angela. She’d heard the doorbell and saw Angela go to answer it from the side of her eye. She just hadn’t realized it would be Frankie in uniform and that he’s lean over her shoulder, look at her work and promptly scold her.

“This stupid case nearly got my sister fired. What the hell are you doing?”

“Don’t talk to Doctor Isles that way!”

“Ma this missing girls case is cursed. Do your remember what happened to Jane? Remember how Korsak had to save her ass from getting fired? And how Arizona—“

He stopped suddenly and glanced at Maura.

“I know about Doctor Robbins,” she offered, “her injuries were quite extensive.”

“Right. And so were my sister’s. I thought Ma was joking when she said you were looking into this.”

She turn around to sharply look at Angela, who wilted under her best Chief Medical Examiner stare. “I thought he could help?”

He nodded, “Right. And the best way to do that is burn all this and forget about it.”

“This man abducted children.”

“Jane’s hunch. There was no proof.”

A very frustrating point. As hard as Maura looked there was nothing yet. No evidence whatsoever. Just clues. Things she would usually refuse to consider facts. In fact, had the case been presented to her without the Jane factor her opinion would have been considerably different.

“Jane believed in this hunch so deeply she nearly lost her job. Something she loves more than anything else. And she nearly lost a girlfriend, whom I presume she also loved as they were engaged at one point.”

That surprised him. Angela shrugged. “She’s very good at getting information. I cracked like a walnut.” She made a pathetic breaking motion for emphasis.

“Dr. Isles—Maura, you can’t even look at blood without calling it a…a…’copper-tinted stain.’ And now you’re following a **hunch**? You’re smarter than this. So’s Jane.”

He was right. Maura was smarter than investigating some eight year old case under the table. She was smarter than assuming guilt without proof. Usually. But Jane…Jane’s “instincts” had saved her more than once. Her instincts were sometimes as fine as any silence. She wouldn’t have thrown away a career. Wouldn’t have flown across the country.

Unless… Jane **could** be emotionally compromised sometimes. And this other woman. Arizona Robbins. What if…

What if this wasn’t about Gregg at all?

Angela’s phone chose to ring at that exact moment and she smiled apologetically before answering it. “Jane,” she said brightly, “we were just talking about you!”

She winked at Maura and Frankie.

But slowly…everything changed.

Her whole self seemed to falter. Her mouth snapped shut. The laughter in her eyes disappeared. She frowned. The frown turned to shock. Then anger. Finally tears sprung up.

“I’m on my way.” That was all she said. Then she hung up the phone. She seemed to forget Maura and Frankie stood there waiting. She was falling into her own world. Maura shot Frankie a look and he hopped over the couch to take his mother by the arm.

“Ma you okay?”

“Jane’s hurt.”

He looked back at Maura. She came around the couch and took Angela’s hands in her own. “Angela. You’re going into shock. Tell us what happened?”

Angela shivered. “Yeah. Yeah. Jane was attacked. She’s in the hospital. I got to go to Seattle? Where do you even fly into there?”

Frankie squeezed his mother’s shoulders. “Ma what happened?”

“She,” she looked up at Frankie. Then at Maura. “She said her throat was cut? Did you know you could even survive that?”

Maura had to hold back her retort; which was about survivability and how it was tied to the efficiency and speediness of the response and to having an excellent and specialized surgeon on hand. She said softly, “I did. You can.”

That seemed to comfort Angela and helped pull her out of the funk she was on the precipice of. She dropped her hands to her side. “I gotta go pack and get a ticket and—I’ll be right back.”

She left before Maura or Frankie could stop her. He sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “I guess I gotta figure out how to put an emergency ticket to Seattle on a debit card with five hundred bucks on it.”

“I’ll pay.” The offer was immediate. It would never be a matter for debate. “I’d like to go. I’m a doctor and—“

“You can put the hurt on the hospital better than I can,” he said with a grin. “I’ll stay here then. Get Korsak and Frost on this from our end? You call me when you get there.”

“I’ll take care of her Frankie. I’ll take care of them both.”

He abruptly pulled her into a hug. “I know you will Doc. You’re family.”

She would never admit it out loud but the thought did strike her, had Arizona Robbins ever been considered family?


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys seriously stop with all the wonderful words (but don’t really because I’m a glutton for comments and criticisms both good and bad). I love how much people are enjoying this fic and willing to come along on this cracklicious ride!

Seattle Grace was considered one of the finest hospitals in the country. At times it was mentioned in the same breath as John Hopkins and Mass Gen. While it had fluctuated remarkably in the last few years in rankings it was still staffed by some of the finest surgeons in the world. Derek Shepherd. Mark Sloan. Richard Webber. These were house hold names in medicine. And others like Arizona Robbins, Callie Torres and Miranda Bailey were whispered of being the next generation of greats. Women who would change the field of medicine.

But the hospital itself, the physical complex, was ordinary. A structure of metal and concrete and glass that glowed dully in the misty night air.

They’d taken the cab directly from the airport, arriving too late for a car rental. There’d been no discussion of going to the hotel first. The hotel could wait. Maura and Angela’s suitcase rolled noisily across the pavement. The large atrium leading to the entrance was dark and quiet so late in the evening. There was a few hospital staff sitting on benches. A visitor leaned against a tree with a cigarette hanging from his mouth.

Inside, away from the noise of the road, things were even quieter. The lobby was empty except for security guards and a few lingering members of the staff. Maura steeled herself for the ordeal ahead. Jane was likely in ICU which had limited visiting hours. They would not be happy with family visiting. They’d turn them away.

But Maura could be persistent.

She tabbed on the front desk with her fingernail and the woman seated their pressed the phone receiver to her shoulder and looked up. “Yes?”

“This is Angela Rizzoli. Her daughter was brought in earlier this evening? We’d like to see her.”

The woman’s shook her head. Her authority was moot. Her resolve inert. “I’m sorry but I can’t—“

A doctor leaning against the desk and looking at a chart quietly closed it and approached them. “Mrs. Rizzoli,” he asked politely.

He was…startlingly good looking. Bright green eyes complimented by skin so warm it could only be described as bronze. He smiled. His dental care was excellent.

“I’m Doctor Avery. I was involved with your daughter’s care this evening.”

Angela rung her hands, “Is she okay? Is she—“

“She’s in ICU at the moment.” He glanced at Maura and she offered her hand.

“Dr. Maura Isles. I’m a family friend.”

He took the hand but her name caused no recognition. That was the problem with surgeons. They always felt they were at the top of the medical practitioner field and never had cause to learn the names of relevant professionals in other disciplines.

It shouldn’t bother her but it always did.

“Would you like to see her? I’ll have them page Dr. Sloan. He was the chief surgeon on her case.”

Angela agreed and he guided them towards the elevator.

Dr. Sloan. That was excellent news. He was a premiere otolaryngologist. If anyone were to work on Jane after a neck injury he would be at the top of Maura’s extremely short list.

He was also very attractive. He met them at the elevator doors in dark blue scrubs and a pristine white lab coat that highlighted his eyes.

“Mrs. Rizzoli?” His voice was deep and warm, “Dr. Sloan. Would you like to come with me?”

He offered Angela a hand which she immediately took. The man exuded confidence. When not dealing with patients and the families of patients he was probably extraordinarily cocky. But with Angela he was polite. The sort of doctor it would be easy for a person to put their faith in.

He explained the surgery and did an adequate job of preparing Angela for what she would see then he pulled open a door to an isolated ICU unit. The woman on the bed looked like Jane in that she had the same facial structure and hair color. But her skin was sallow and sunken and her head was covered in wires. More came from beneath her gown and her neck had disappeared beneath bulky bandages. Her hair was dirty and clumped and someone had brushed it to one side in an attempt at presentation.

But it wasn’t Jane. Jane was vibrant even when ill. She exuded energy even when sleeping. Her skin had a healthy glow beneath a dark tan and when her eyes were closed her lips always curled up into a smile.

“You’re a doctor,” Dr. Sloan asked under his breath.

“I am.” She did not need to elaborate on what kind. She liked to think a gifted otolaryngologist such as himself wouldn’t judge her for her pursuits but one could never be too careful, even a gifted and respected forensic pathologist and the youngest Chief Medical Examiner in the Commonwealth’s history.

He gave her a much more technical breakdown of Jane’s state and the methods he’d employed to keep her alive. It was vast and overwhelming and against her will Maura braced herself on the handle of her suitcase.

“A stroke?” Her voice was quiet. Why hadn’t he mentioned it to Angela?

She looked over. Angela had very gently taken her daughter’s hand into her own and was crying over it.

“We’re unsure yet as to the damager. Dr. Shepherd has examined the scans and as has our stroke specialist. I’d like to be an optimist but until we bring her out of sedation and properly evaluate her we can’t know. It could be minor. A few weeks of rehabilitation. Or it could be—“

“I know very well the complications of a stroke,” she said tersely. Jane’s carotid artery had been severed. It was usually fatal. But usually the best ear, neck and throat surgeon in the Pacific Northwest wasn’t across the hall. When there was blockage in a carotid artery the ensuing stroke usually led to paralysis on one whole half of the body. Jane could end up in a wheel chair. She could end up washed out of the police department. Unable to communicate. To hold a gun. Jog. To do anything she’d once done with ease. 

Sloan had the courtesy to say nothing more. His lips formed a thin line as he held whatever retort he likely had. Instead he nodded. “Dr. Avery will be here through the night to monitor Jane. My daughter and girlfriend are downstairs and both very exhausted so I’ll be leaving.” He pulled a card from his pocket. “If you have any questions Dr. Avery can’t answer you can reach me here.”

She took the hard and waited for him to leave. But he didn’t. He joined her to watch Angela grieve over her daughter in silence.

“You know I had dinner with her a few times this week. She’s fun. Hell on wheels.” He glanced at her, “She’s strong Dr. Isles. And with an injury like that? She’s the kind that pulls through.”

The card was crushed in her hand as she held back a series of confusing and horrifically painful emotions.

Jane was her best friend. Her very best friend. And she’d nearly thrown away that friendship away for a criminal. For a father that could only relate to her through violence. What had they said to each other? What had been her last words to Jane? Did she know she was sorry? That she was as eager to fix things as Jane was?

Did she know she cared?

“She’s very strong Dr. Sloan.” She could say it with confidence. There was no one stronger. “She’s the strongest person I know.”

  


####

Arizona chose not to approach Jane’s little portion of the ICU. She saw Mark talking to a woman in the door and had felt the irresistible urge to bolt. But she hadn’t done that either. Stuck between the urges to run and the urges to check on Jane she settled on the most worthless exercise, leaning on the nurse’s station and perusing charts that needed no perusal at all.

Mark said his goodbyes to the inhabitants of the room and sleepily sauntered towards her. “I’m exhausted,” he moaned, just quiet enough to not be heard by the people he’d left in Jane’s room. “Julia told you Sofia and I are staying with her tonight right?”

She had. They were going to stay with Julia and the patrol car outside her apartment would keep an eye on them. Callie and Arizona would stay at the Archfield. Tomorrow they’d reassess.

“How is she?”

He thought about it. “She’s good. Good stats despite everything.”

“Angela?”

“That the mom?”

She nodded.

“Seems tough. Most people are dead on their feet after an evening flight from Boston. It’s three in the morning there. And the other woman is gonna be a lot of fun I can tell.”

The other woman. Maura Isles? She peered over Mark’s shoulder to get another glimpse of her, but the woman had disappeared into the room.

“Your exe’s new girlfriend huh?” Despite the very serious nature of Jane’s injuries Mark was still enjoying the drama of Isles’ arrival. He raised an eyebrow.

She used her fingers to form quotations. “Her ‘friend.’ Jane’s crazy about her though.” 

“Yeah, the good Dr. Isles has definite non-friend feelings. I was giving her my best looks and she was turning me down. She’s either batting for your team or Yang’s.”

Yang’s team being the one made up of a very small portion of the straight female population that found itself effortlessly resisting Mark’s charms.

He leaned in and lowered his voice, “Want me to do more investigating? I can put Avery on it.”

She frowned, “I don’t need Avery hitting on Jane’s best friend.”

“He’s good at it though. And she’s good looking so it’s not like it’d be a problem—“ He abruptly stopped talking—no doubt realizing that Arizona was about to cause him bodily harm. He tilted his head. “You okay Robbins?”

She nodded jerkily. “I…am. I am.”

He squinted his eyes in his very physical method of studying others. “You sure? Because I imagine this has all gotta be rough on you. An ex-fiancee nearly killed by a stalker. Your wife and daughter coming within inches of the guy? I’m ready to murder someone myself.”

Once upon a time she never would have confided in a Mark Sloan. She despised Mark Sloans. Only this Mark Sloan was her family. He’d wriggled her way into her relationship with Callie and though he’d eventually wriggled his way out it had left them both dramatically changed. To the point that she could now confide in him in a way she could with few others.

“I brought him here.”

“Because of whatever happened in Boston?”

She’d expected some judgement. Some harsh words after such a confession. Truth be told she’d desired it a little bit—her emotional martyr streak flaring up in this moment of crisis. 

“How did you—“

“Callie told me this morning. Thought I deserved a heads up.”

There was the reproach, but it was less then she probably deserved.

“You did something stupid Robbins. I’m not gonna say it’s all okay because it put my daughter and my two best friends in danger, but I can’t hate you for it. That’s why I’m asking: are **you** okay?”

Wordlessly she stepped close to Mark and he put his arms around her, resting his chin on the top of her head and pulling her close. He was still Mark, with his pungent Mark scent and his wiry body, but sometimes he was Tim or Nick. That comforting brother who’d let her cry on his shoulder but never, ever, tell a soul or tease her. Because sometimes—sometimes he’d cry too.

  


####

“Arizona stuck at work again?”

Ma was trying to sound curious and polite but Jane rolled her eyes anyways. “She got a little held up.”

Her mother very purposely held her tongue.

“She’ll be here Ma.”

Unlike the last few times. Fake dating Gregg had become a little bit of an obsession. She’d curl up in bed and rest her head on Jane’s stomach and flip through texts he’d left her and breathlessly recount messages.

“What are you going to do when he tries to take this thing to the next level,” she’d asked.

The idea that he’s sleep with her—that their relationship was something more than a game—had not struck Arizona yet. But she quickly dismissed it. “I’ll start carrying sleeping pills or something. Knock him out.”

“Arizona…”

“Or I’ll find the evidence we need.”

Because she was convinced more than ever that Gregg was the one kidnapping little girls. Especially since as the abductor had suddenly stopped abducting girls. Just as Gregg became more enamored with Arizona.

“Maybe you could just break up with him.”

“Isn’t that when serial killers escalate? When they’re rejected?”

It was. She’d tugged Arizona up so she lay beside her and held her close. “I’ll find a way to get us out of this.”

Jane stepped away from her mother’s kitchen and pulled out her phone to call Arizona. Thankfully before she hit send Arizona stumbled into the room. She flew by and kissed Jane on the cheek. 

“Sorry. Dumb surgery.”

Ma looked up from the shove. “You showed up. I was beginning to think you and Jane had broken up and she just hadn’t told us.”

Arizona’s smile was tightlipped. She took a seat at the kitchen bar and plucked an olive from the top of the salad Jane had been put in charge of making. “Nope. Just stuck in my residency. We don’t get a lot of free time.”

And what little free time Arizona did have was spent studying the Gregg case.

Jane wrapped an arm around her girlfriend’s waist for support, “Arizona’s the top resident for her year. Means all the attendings want her.”

Arizona shrugged, soaking in Jane’s praise. “A good resident is a busy resident.”

“You must be the best resident ever then,” Ma muttered.

Jane kissed Arizona’s temple, “You should show Ma your sewing skills after dinner. This lady can do a running stitch faster then Grandma.”

Her mother raised an eyebrow in surprise. “You sew?”

Arizona held up her hands and wriggled her fingers, “You should see my whip stitch.”

  


####

The door to the ICU unit slid open again and Maura looked up from her vigil to watch the new arrival. At first she suspected she was the stroke specialist. The hospital seemed to keep their staff in color-coded scrubs and this woman wore the same dark blue one’s Sloan did. But she wasn’t wearing a lab coat as he’d been. Just dark wrinkled scrubs and tennis shoes.

And she didn’t have that…dressed look an attending physician usually had. Her hair was in a loose and hastily drawn up ponytail and her eyes were a little sunken. She looked as exhausted as Maura felt.

She stepped closer. Her dark blue eyes studying Maura briefly before flickering to Angela. It was there, in the heartbroken look she gave Jane’s mother, that her identity was revealed.

“Angela,” she said gently. She seemed stuck between a natural desire for flight and a driving need to stay in the room and stay focused on Angela.

She wiped the tears away and sat up from her place at Jane’s side.

The woman swallowed. “Mark spoke to you. About the situation?”

She was trying to sound…professional, which Maura could have told her was stupid. Angela Rizzoli didn’t do professional. She’d bring cookies and milk to a prison break.

Angela scowled—a rare expression for her and one usually limited towards directing at her children or ex-husband. Only this time there was more venom in it. “I told her it was stupid to come here.”

The woman ducked her head, “I know.”

“After what you did to her? She should have just sent you an email and moved on with her life.”

The other woman was at a loss for words. Her mouth tried to form words but nothing came out. Finally she inhaled slowly. Exhaled. “I’m so sorry.” A genuine apology.

Angela was up as fast as a cat. “You’re sorry? My little girl’s barely alive because of you. Because she still loves you Lord knows why!”

The urge for apologies vanished in a flash of anger. “I was engaged to her for five years Angela. As good as married for four of those. If it had been the other way around you don’t think I would have been on the first plane to Boston?”

“No you’d be half way across the Pacific! Hiding out in your daddy’s little bungalow in Hawaii.”

“I did that **once**!” she crossed her arms stubbornly, “I loved your daughter. You may not believe that because you formed all your social values before women could **vote** apparently but we were a **real** thing. Realer than any of those girls Tommy brought home.”

Angela moved on the woman, shaking her finger and rapidly destroying every bit of peace and quiet in the room. “ **Don’t** you bring Tommy into this Arizona,” she growled, “He’s not the one that ran out on his fiancee because of a job offer in **Seattle**. He’s not the one that couldn’t be bothered to pick up a phone after Hoyt nearly killed her!”

Dr. Robbins mouth clamped shut and before she could open it to unleash another tirade another woman stepped into the room and darted between Robbins and Angela. Like Robbins she was dressed in dark blue scrubs. So another doctor. She put a hand on Robbins’ waist and pushed her back towards the door. 

Avery was right behind her and came close to Angela, offering to find her a bed so she can stay in the room even though they usually didn’t allow family to remain in the ICU after hours.

“We should go to the hotel,” Maura said distantly. She was exhausted. Drained physically and emotionally, and seeing the woman Jane had nearly given her whole life over too had sapped the very last ounce of strength she had.

She looked at Avery. “Is there a taxi stand or—“

The other woman had slipped quietly back into the room and offered, “We can take you.” She had warm intelligent brown eyes concentrated on Angela, “My wife and I are staying at the Archfield. She had me book you rooms as well.”

Angela was unimpressed and her arms were crossed over her chest. “You’re the wife huh?” Callie Torres. She was the one that called Angela with the news.

“I am,” she said brightly, “and you’re already taking our marriage better than my mother.” She smiled and Maura wasn’t quite certain if it was real or fake.

Too tired to figure it out or argue she introduced herself. “That sounds like a wonderful idea.”

Torres gave her a cursory glance, “Maura right? Jane’s mentioned you,” she said—her tone a little too gossipy for Maura’s taste. “Arizona and I will be waiting down in the lobby. Whenever you two are ready to go?”

  


####

Arizona fidgeted in the drivers seat as Callie came out alone. She’d lost her temper. Kind of big time. Which she wasn’t a fan of doing usually. 

Callie shuffled in and shifted in her seat. “So. You and Jane’s mom?”

“We’ve never had a good relationship.”

“Clearly. You nearly pulled Jane out of her medically induced coma with all the yelling.”

“She—“ started it? Callie raised an eyebrow and waited for her to finish that defense. “She thinks I turned her daughter gay.”

“And yet she came out here with her daughter’s new girlfriend.”

“Best friend,” Arizona countered. “They’re just friends.”

Callie made a very sassy murmur of agreement and leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. Blindly she reached out and put her hand on Arizona’s thigh. “It’s okay.”

Arizona sighed and leaned against her head rest. “She was the first mom I ever had to deal with it. You’ve met my mom. She’s would have put up rainbow streamers when I came out if it would make me feel better. Angela…”

“Is still better then my mother.”

Valid.

“Sorry,” she apologized. 

Callie patted her on the leg. “Want to wake me when we get to the hotel?”

Arizona really didn’t want to ride in the car with just Angela and Maura, but Callie was easily more exhausted than she looked—which wasn’t good. She needed her rest. Arizona caressed her hand. “Sure,” she said softly.

  


####

There was only one car outside the hospital entrance. It’s lights were on and she could see the shadow of two people inside so it was safe to assume it was their ride.

Angela was quiet beside her, her anger at Dr. Robbins still very palpable.  The woman herself hopped out of the car when they were close and opened the rear of the SUV. She quietly helped put their bags away. Maura didn’t fail to notice that theirs were the only bags in the car.

The other woman, Dr. Torres, was asleep in the front sleep, her mouth hung open and her face slack. Arizona caught her looking in the rear view mirror and her dark eyes challenged Maura to mention it.

Maura was too exhausted to comment. She leaned back on the bench. Angela was on the other side. A child’s car seat separated them.

“You have a kid,” Angela observed.

Robbins nodded, “I do. Sofia. She’s about fourteen months.”

“But she’s not yours.”

Maura started to interject, but Arizona’s hands tightened on the wheel, “She’s my daughter Angela. As much as Jane is yours.”

Maura really was quite exhausted and in need of at least a few hours of sleep, but having to ride in a car with these two women for any length of time was going to be unpleasant. Which meant she could leap out of the moving car or she could change the subject.

“Dr. Robbins,” she said courteously, “You went to John Hopkins?”

“I did.”

“I believe you were a few years ahead of me there.”

A blond eyebrow curved in surprise, “Really?”

“Dr. Roberts was very fond of you.”

She smiled, “Dr. Roberts.” She frowned in thought, “Wait. You’re the valedictorian who went into pathology aren’t you? He had a lot to say about you.”

“Something wrong with pathology,” Angela asked quite surlily from her corner.

“No,” Arizona was quick to say, “I love pathology.”

“Not everyone has the **ego** for surgery. Isn’t that what you used to say?”

“Angela…”

Maura couldn’t win. At all. She prickled a little at the implied insult. Not from Angela, but from Arizona. She probably had said that. Surgeons always said that. They saw pathologists, especially forensic pathologists, as the rejects. You cut up dead bodies because you couldn’t cut up live ones.

“I always found the field of pathology fascinating,” she opined, “Staying up until two in the morning to finish an examination and help the police find a killer. Giving a victim with no voice rest and peace. Surgery is nice, but I relish the demand faced in pathology.”

“And,” she looked out the window. They were nearly to the hotel, it sign was brighter in the distance, “it’s how I met Jane.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ll be out of town for work for a few weeks but hopefully I’ll be able to get a few more chapters in during downtimes. If I don’t at least you know why!

Callie felt like she’d been hit by another truck when she woke up. The Archfield mattresses, once places of sweet respite from emotional break ups…or George, had become hard as a rock. Her whole body was stiff and things popped like she was ninety when she stretched.

It would have been minutely better if she hadn’t woken up alone and when she realized Arizona’s side of the bed was cool she had to tamp down a whole mess of frustration that flooded her system.

Frustration and anger. She was going to murder the woman.

A card slipped into a brass card slot and the door opened though. Arizona stepped in with two enormous coffees and a bag of pastries from the downstairs. A smile she knew must have looked goofy spread across Callie’s face.

“You’re awake,” Arizona said softly, as though Sofia was in the next room and would wake up at the drop of a pin.

“You got breakfast?”

“Had trouble sleeping. **Someone** kept fidgeting and kicking me away when I tried to cuddle.”

Callie didn’t remember that. She let the covers pool in her lap and accepted the offered coffee. Arizona sipped her own coffee while surveying the bed. She made some sort of judgement call, kicked off her shoes and hopped back in.

“Comfortable,” Callie asked. Arizona shrugged off her pants and curled up under the covers.

“Yes.” She reached for the bag of pastries which Callie had managed to acquire but Callie held them just out of reach.

“Are you working today?”

“I’ve got a surgery this morning. Then I’m going back to the apartment to clean up.”

The reminder of what happened the night before sapped any playfulness Callie had felt. She let the bag drop and Arizona, rather then reach for unguarded pastries, sat up. She dropped a kiss on Callie’s shoulder.

“You okay?”

“Not really. How are you?”

Her wife’s face screwed up in thought, “I don’t know. I feel like,” she pulled away, “It’s like how I work with kids. I can’t get attached.”

Callie hoped her raised eyebrow was enough to convey her offense at that statement. 

“Not you,” Arizona was quick to say, “I mean, he attacked me before and he nearly killed me. And Jane—Jane’s a cop. She was facing death every other week when we were together. And I guess I just got good at—“

“Being the military wife.”

A wistful smile crossed her wife’s face. “Right. Exactly. I got good at managing the crisis.”

Callie thought back to her hospital stay. It had been grueling and she hadn’t been…the best patient. She’d half expected Arizona to bail at every turn. It just made sense given Africa and everything. But her then fiancee had gone into some sort of crisis mode and become a super woman. Preparing the apartment, getting the nursery finished. Handling Callie’s residents and dealing with the hospital staff and their parents. Where even the strongest might have wavered Arizona had stood strong—always with a smile and confidence.

“You’re not getting…flashbacks?” Everyone dealt with trauma differently. Callie couldn’t even fathom how someone would feel after having their home violated by a man who once nearly killed them. She was just the wife and had to try hard not to think about it before anger and fear battled from prominence.

“I’m terrified, you know? He’s in Seattle—in our **home** —because of something **I** did. But I’m not going to run from him. And I’m not going to let him get to me.”

Callie’s wife. A bundle of contradictions. She would run from those she loved but stubbornly stand against a serial killer, a car crash and put herself between a child and a gun man.

“I guess I had practice. With my mom.” Her mother’s behavior proved that there needed to be a word that superseded cheerful. “And now Angela’s here and she—she definitely rivals my mom when she wants to. Only about ten times naggier.” Arizona curled her fingers into a claw. “She just kind of digs into you.”

“Fuuuun.”

Callie rooted through the bag and pulled out a cream cheese danish which she handed to her wife, as the other one looked like orange and Arizona hated orange in her pastries. She took a bite of her own danish and tried not to frown.

Arizona didn’t manage that. She readjusted and gnawed on hers. “This danish—“

“Is like a brick.” Callie split her danish in half and chewed on the center. “It’s a little better in the middle.”

Arizona followed suit. “Chewy,” she said, her mouth full of pastry that had seen better days.

They ate in companionable silence. Like they’d done dozens—hundreds—of times before. Arizona repositioned herself so her head rested on Callie’s lap and her feet lay on the nightstand. She even drank her coffee that way—a feat that had made Callie a little envious once or twice. 

It was peaceful for the first time in a week. If she let her vision go a little fuzzy they could be back in their apartment with Sofia in the next room. Enjoying a lazy Sunday morning instead of being up at six in the morning and stuck at the Archfield.

“So Jane’s ‘friend.’ What’s up with her?”

Arizona sort of twisted so she could look up at her wife, “Really?”

“I’m a little on edge and gossip makes things easier. So the friend.”

“Apparently went to Hopkins with me,” she said with just a hint of bitterness in her voice.

“Yeah, and she’s younger.”

“Like **two** years. That’s hardly anything.”

“Younger. Just as smart. Just as accomplished.” She ticked them off with her right hand.

“Carter Madison grants trump infant Medical Examiners every day of the week Callie.”

“Bet she’s published more too.”

Arizona groaned, grabbed a fist full of pillow and whacked Callie in the face. 

Callie frowned, “She even kind of looks like you.”

Arizona paused mid-swing, mirroring Callie’s face. “She does.”

She resumed but Callie snatched the pillow away and pinned her wife to the bed. “Not as cute though.” She pressed her lips delicately to Arizona’s neck. Her heartbeat fluttered against Callie’s lips and her fingers dug into Callie’s shoulder.

“Mm,” she moaned, “I missed that.”

Her other hand fell to the waist of Arizona’s pants and teased the button there. “Did you?”

“Mm hm. That too.”

She dragged her nail across Arizona’s stomach and nipped gently at her neck. 

“All of that. Missed it.” Arizona wrapped her hands in Callie’s hair and pulled her away. “I missed **you**.”

They’re mouths met in a kiss that was surprisingly searing. They’d been so heated and yet strangely distant for the last week. Dancing around each other and then meeting in bed for mechanical fumblings that did little to ease all the ache. The sex had had an alluring quality but had been so fraught with emotions unsaid that Callie had found herself increasingly dissatisfied.

Now for the first time they were on equal footing. There weren’t any secrets. No more massive emotional bombshells lurked in the closet.

She slipped her hand into Arizona’s pants and when her wife gasped the sensation was so familiar that, unbidden, tears sprang up. Arizona caught her face in her hands, her lower half still unconciously rising up to meet Callie.

“What?”

She ducked her head into the crook of Arizona’s neck. “I missed you too,” she whispered.

Her fingers travelled well worn and familiar paths. Normally that was when Arizona would fling her head back into the pillow and close her eyes and lick her lower lip. But she held Callie close and kissed her hard instead. 

 

####

“He kissed you?”

“On the mouth!”

Arizona was pacing and Jane was helpless to stop her.

“What if we took this too far Jane? This guy…likes me. He’s expecting things and I don’t—“

She hopped off her stool and stepped in front of her girlfriend. “Okay when I guy hits on you normally what do you do?”

“Smile. Walk away.”

“What about guy friends? Ever had a guy friend get the wrong idea?”

She rolled her eyes, “No. Because I don’t hang out with neckbeards who think they can straighten out a gay girl.”

Jane sighed and let her head fall, “Okay.” She put both hands on Arizona’s shoulder. “This I have experience with.”

“Because all cops are neckbeards?”

“I’m not really sure what that is, **but** guys who won’t take no? I totally get that.”

Arizona gave her a look that said she didn’t like Jane’s friends. 

“Not the guys I work with! Wierdos. On the street. They see the uniform and think I’m a fantasy built just for their loser butts.”

“Okay. So how do you get rid of them.”

“Usually I call my partner over or flash my gun.”

Clearly that wouldn’t work in this particular case.

“We’ll let him down slowly, over a couple of days. Like how I broke up with this guy a few years ago. Took him two weeks to realize I hadn’t called him in three.”

“And if Gregg doesn’t want to be let down slowly? What if he—“

“Hey,” she dug her fingers into Arizona’s shoulders. “He’s not doing anything with you you don’t want. **I’ll** make sure of that. Okay?”

Arizona sucked in a breath a little too shaky for a surgeon. “Okay,” she stepped close. Slipped her hands around Jane’s middle and rested her head on her chest. “I can—we can do this.”

Jane ran her hand through Arizona’s hair and dropped a kiss on top of her head, “Yeah. We can.”

 

####

Maura had difficultly sleeping and when seven rolled around she was already dressed and awake. Angela had taken the second bedroom in the suite and her door was still shut without a glimmer of light peeking through the cracks so Maura made her way downstairs for breakfast. 

The actual restaurant was filled with heavy foods, strong odors and loud people preparing for a day sightseeing or business meetings. She took a cup of yogurt and an little box of orange juice and sat out in the lobby instead.

Dr. Robbins and her wife came through a few minutes later laughing and acting perfectly at ease. They had an easy chemistry, their hands clasped out in public. Robbins leaned into her wife and her wife tilted her head just to be a little closer. They were a sweet couple. More romantic than many of the straight couples Maura knew. And they were doctors—surgeons. It wasn’t a profession full of happy and loving people—but distanced ego maniacs who couldn’t connect to a toddler.

Jane was unconscious in a hospital and holding onto life by a thread. These women— **that** woman was at least partially responsible and yet she moved through the lobby like it was just another day. 

They didn’t see her and it was probably for the best. There would have been an awkward pause. They would have acted embarrassed being caught laughing and she would have felt uncomfortable after the preceding night’s fraught emotions and then they would have shuffled away apologetically and what little appetite she had would have gone up in a puff.

She finished her yogurt in silence then went to the concierge to order a rental to be delivered to the hotel. When she made it back upstairs Angela was awake, dressed and standing in the seating area with a cup of room brewed coffee.

“You don’t want to eat something?”

The older woman shook her head, “I can’t eat.”

Nothing more needed to be said on the subject. “Doctor Robbins left about thirty minutes ago so I’ve arranged for a rental car to be delivered.”

Angela opened her mouth to protest the expenditure. As she did any time Maura spent money on her or her family. She held up a hand to quiet the other woman. “It really isn’t a problem Angela.”

“But the plane tickets and the hotel too? Maura this is costing you a fortune.”

“And Jane’s my best friend. This is the very least I can do for you.”

Angela set her coffee down and quickly crossed the room to squeeze Maura into a suffocating hug. “You’re such a good girl,” she hummed maternally.

Maura’s own mother was not particularly affectionate physically. Even with the dramatic shifts in their relationship over the last year they’d maintained a cordial distance when it came to physical displays of affection. 

But Angela. Angela would hug a burglar and make him cookies. She freely gave out hugs—which had led Jane to always be wary of them. Not Maura. She leaned into the hug and gratefully accepted Angela’s soft warmth.

She had the urge to say something about how it would be okay. To attempt to verbally comfort Angela. But it wouldn’t—couldn’t be. A killer had maimed her friend and left her in a hospital and they were thousands of miles from home with only each other to find support from.

It was very much the opposite of okay.

 

####

Mark had intended to get into work earlier but after an epic surgery on Arizona’s ex and a night with a fussy baby at his girlfriend’s he instead slept like the dead and barely made it into the hospital to drop off Sofia before rounds. Callie and Arizona were both waiting for them outside the daycare and jostled briefly to see who would grab their daughter first. Callie won by virtue of having a longer reach then her wife but held Sofia so that Arizona could still get in maximum snuggles.

And since when did he start using words like ‘snuggles’? Robbins and her cloying Peds sentimentality were rubbing off on him.

“Any luck finding the guy who apparently can just waltz into your apartment yet?” Mark was going to sue the apartment manager into ten generations of poverty. Maybe Callie and Arizona would sign onto the suit too.

Arizona shook her head. “Nothing. The detective said he’d be in touch. Until then we get police escorts when we’re not at the hospital.”

“Yeah about that, you know they’ll still pull you over for speeding?”

Both women blinked.

“Ran a stop sign.” The guy was supposed to be protecting Mark’s daughter from crazy men with knives! Not scoring an easy ticket for a rolling stop.

Callie arched an eyebrow, “Wow. Good job Mark. Were you doing cocaine off a hooker at the same time?”

Arizona made a shushing noise and put a hand over Sofia’s ear protectively.

“No,” he retorted. “I was texting Julia.” Why did he admit these things to these women? Both women opened their mouths to unleash tirades but Mark’s pager bleated. He held his hands up defensively, “And that’s my cue. Lunch? Lunch?”

He didn’t wait for an affirmative but turn and jogged to the elevator.

The page had been for Arizona’s friend. 

 

####

The good looking younger doctor, Avery intercepted them on their way to Jane’s room. He tried to make small talk as he walked with them and snapped in what he seemed to think was an unobtrusive manner when one of the nurses saw them.

“How is she,” Angela asked. Her voice was rough with grief and she was wise to whatever game he was playing.

“She’s fine.”

“Really? Because from where I’m standing it would appear you were attempting to stall us.” Maura crossed her arms for extra haughty doctor menace.

“That would be because of me,” Mark Sloan rounded the corner with a smile. “I wanted to go in with you all and see how she was doing.”

Angela looked at him suspiciously, “You normally so hands on with patients’ family?”

“I am not. But normally those patients aren’t the ex-fiancee of the mother of my child. In Jane’s case I’m making an exception.”

“Arizona had sex with a man?”

“Her wife did.” He paused right after he said it. Like maybe he’d just realized he’d said too much and said it in a completely blasé manner. Avery rolled his eyes.

Angela waved off the whole concept and headed for Jane’s room. “I never understand all the hippy dippy gay stuff of Arizona’s and I don’t really want to know now.”

Maura was seeing a disaster on her hand and interjected, “That wasn’t a slight against Dr. Robbins’ sexuality by the way. They just happen to have some…history.”

“I noticed,” Avery muttered.

“Not a problem,” Sloan said, “I don’t get Robbins half the time either.”

They found Jane in much the same state they’d left her in before. Her hair was still dirty and brushed to the side and her skin was still pale beneath her tan and the bandages on her neck were still bulky and dehumanizing.

Dr. Sloan voice was low as he explained his plan. Soon she’d be moved to a stroke unit where they could better monitor what he felt was the biggest threat to her health.

“Is she gonna wake up,” Angela asked.

What a question to ask? Angela posed it casually. Like asking about a family pet—not her daughter. Would she wake up? Could she? And who would she be? 

All the fights they’d had. Arguments over things petty and grand. It didn’t make sense any more.

And there was Angela just asking the doctor in a voice fraught with grief, timidity and the iron will of a mother, “Will she wake up.”

Maura had to close her eyes a moment to shut it all out. Because if she kept looking at her best friend and seeing that conversation carried out in the corner of her eyes she’d probably crumble to the floor in a million little pieces.

He nodded. “When she’s ready,” he said gently, “You’re welcome to stay here, but you need to both be quiet.” His tone turned scolding, “Respectful.”

“As long as Arizona doesn’t come waltzing in here—“

“To her too. She’s a doctor at this hospital and again,” he smile was so tight it was nearly a grimace, “I’m kind of fond of her.” Sloan always seemed to have a little bit of a lilt in his voice. Like he was a step away from a self depreciating joke that would humanize an otherwise godly man, but there was hardness in his tone at the mention of Arizona and the chastisement, though slight, was enough to make Angela back down.

He and Avery left and Angela took the seat next to Jane’s bed. Since the night before someone had added another chair and Maura sat in it gratefully.

 

####

“You’re really leaving?”

Jane and Arizona had danced delicately around each other after Arizona’s announcement. She was leaving Boston and taking the job in Seattle. It wasn’t CHOPs or Texas Children’s or Boston Children’s but it was a program with potential and after the aging head of Peds she’d be the top dog in a very small pond working with some of the best surgeons in the country.

Jane had accepted the decision mutely.

Angela…Angela had not.

“Well what about the wedding?”

Arizona sighed. “There isn’t one Angela.”

She ducked under the bed to pull out her rollerblades. She hadn’t used them in years and for the first time in a while they seemed…childish to her.

“You go and get engaged to my daughter and the minute things turn a little south you leave?”

Beneath the bed Arizona sighed. “If that’s the way you want to look at Angela yes.”

“Tommy’s in jail. And your brother—“

She pushed herself back out into the open air and sat up. “Don’t bring Tim into this.”

To her credit Angela looked sad. She knelt next to Arizona and tried to put a hand on her knee but Arizona pulled back. “It’s been a year. And you’re still grieving.”

“Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t Jane or Frankie? What if Tommy didn’t just get put away for drunk driving? What if he’d hit a wall going sixty”

“Don’t **you** make this about Tommy.”

“I’m not,” she said firmly, “It isn’t about Tommy. Or Tim. It isn’t even about the fact you’re still pissed I’m a woman.”

Angela rolled her eyes. “Right. So you’re a girl. Big deal.”

“Don’t give me that. You’ve been pissed Jane was dating a woman since she first told you.”

“Yeah. I was. Back before I knew you and Jane just popped it out at dinner one night and seemed to change twenty something years of history we had with her I really wasn’t crazy about it but I got over it Arizona. You can get over a lot of big stuff when you love someone.”

Damn it. Arizona’s mom was so ridiculously loving and nurturing and sweet. Angela could be too, but she could also be a spitfire full of fire and brimstone when she really wanted to and she switched between the two extremes so suddenly that Arizona never quite had a grasp on her.

Of course according to her parents, Tim and Jane she had problems with really getting anyone. She was always just a hair off. Just out of reach of understanding the way the people around her worked.

It didn’t bother her. She was a surgeon and she could talk to kids better than any other surgeon she knew and Seattle Grace was offering her a job.

“I’m sorry Angela, I really am, but I got this job and I can’t ask Jane to go with me. She just got moved from Vice to Homicide. And she’s got you all—”

“And you don’t?”

No. She didn’t.

 

####

Arizona snuck into the ICU after her first surgery of the day. Callie had made her promise not to get into another fight with Angela but that wouldn’t stop her from checking with the shift nurse or, if they were there, Mark or Avery.

The two other women had made it from the hotel to the hospital and were sitting by Jane’s bed dozing. That’s all there was to do while she was unconscious. Sit. Wait. Stare. She stepped out of the line of sight of the room to avoid being caught by Angela and nearly bumped into Avery.

“Are you going in,” he asked.

“No.”

He grinned and flashed those very pretty teeth of his. “Because Sloan would probably want me to bring in a SWAT team if you did.”

“Avery?”

His voice went a little high in response to the steel in hers, “Yes?”

“Go away.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Wait. “Is she okay?”

He turned, “She’s still sleeping. Sloan’s put me on her for the rest of the day,” he said sourly, “So anything comes up I’ll be here.”

She smiled, not because of Avery. He sounded pretty pissed about his job, but because Mark had thought to do it. “Thanks,” she said.

He shrugged and slipped into the nurse’s office.

Arizona started to leave. Just seeing Jane had been enough, and knowing Mark had Avery on the case made it all a little better.

“Dr. Robbins?” Maura Isles stepped out of the ICU unit. She glanced back wistfully then scooted over to Arizona. “I wanted to introduce myself. Without…”

Angela.

“Is she all right?”

“She’s doing well enough with everything.”

“Good.” She meant it. She and Angela never got along; there was some unspeakable chasm that had always existed between them filled with all the expectations and insinuations and lost dreams they each represented. But Angela had been something to her. Something important.

Maura seemed to be considering something because her face screwed up in thought. “Have you spoken with the police?” 

Ah. Jane said Isles liked a mystery. “Not today. They’re looking for him.”

“And the scene?”

Of the crime. “I’m going to clean it up later today.”

“Can I—can I come?”

Arizona raised an eyebrow.

“It’s just. While Jane is sleeping there isn’t very much to do, but maybe if I could see the scene of the crime. Maybe I could figure out a way to understand him.” She was rambling. Sort of like Arizona did. Callie would find it hilarious. Jane less so. “I’ve read all the previous reports, including yours for the initial victims and I keep feeling like—“ 

Words failed a woman Arizona suspected was rarely reticent.

“I’ve got to head back to the OR right now. But I’ll stop by on my way.”

“Thank you.” The promise of more clues to the puzzle her mind was desperately trying to solve seemed a balm to Dr. Isles. Arizona turned to leave but she called out once more, “Oh, and Dr. Robbins?” A moment of communion between them so unexpected Arizona’s eyes widened in astonishment I’m sorry.”

It was such a genuine gesture. An unnecessary apology that carried within it so many more. Arizona took a deep breath. “I’m sorry too.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the long break between updates. If you’re reading my other stuff you’ll know that I was out of town for most of August. So what was supposed to be a week or two between updates turned into FOUR. Not cool. I don’t think that will be a problem in the future though. At least for the next few chapters.
> 
> WARNING: There’s a description of violence in this chapter. Specifically a male on female assault.

“I always find coming home after something violent happened and having to clean is almost as bad as the act itself.”

Dr. Robbins said nothing but gave Maura what Jane called “side eye.”

“Clearly it **isn’t** the same, but that sense of violation is remarkably present.”

Dr. Robbins now looked quite skeptical. “Does that happen to you a lot?”

“No. Not a lot. It happens to Jane much more often.”

The other woman looked ahead. They were stuck on her very slow elevator that moved from the lobby of her building up to her apartment. She’d come by late in the afternoon and motioned to Maura from across the hall. Jane had still been unconscious at that point so Maura had motioned her intent to Angela and slipped out before Angela could launch into another Anti-Robbins tirade.

“People invade Jane’s home?”

“It seems like it happens all the time. I blame Hoyt. That man had far too many apprentices.”

She’d meant it to be flippant, because surgeons, like cops, were supposed to be fond of gallows humor. Only Robbins just looked sad. 

“What about you? Is this your first home invasion?”

“Yes.” She took a breath. “Jane didn’t mention how talkative you were.”

“And she didn’t mention you at all,” she said cheerfully.

The elevator arrived and Robbins stepped off first. She turned around and put her hand over the door’s sensor, effectively trapping Maura in with her arm. 

“Is this what you and I are going to do? Play the ‘who know’s Jane better’ game? Because I can promise you if it’s limited to information dating back before 2007 I’ll win.”

“I…”

“But if it’s present day then you’ve probably got one on me. I wasn’t there for Hoyt, the last time I knew Tommy he still had a driver’s license, and in my head Angela and Frank are married. So you win. Okay?”

“I was just trying to make conversation and put you at ease as we’re about to enter your home that was recently violated by a mad man.”

Dr. Robbins deflated. “Oh,” she said simply. “So you weren’t being passive aggressive?”

“No.” She slipped beneath Robbins’ arm and made a bee line for the door with the yellow police tape. “But for the record,” she said slyly, “I do probably know her better.”

 

####

Arizona took risks. Tim may have been the Army Ranger (a slap in the face to his father the Marine) and he may have been the guy into climbing mountains and diving out of planes, but Arizona risked her career by taking on patients and performing miracles. She was openly gay even when her direct superior was known to not like gay people. Also she SCUBA dived, but that was less about risk and more about the cool equipment.

Point was she wasn’t averse to it.

She knew that her and Jane’s efforts to entrap Hamilton Gregg were dangerous. She knew it entailed risk. She did it anyways. The man was a monster and if putting herself in a minute amount of danger meant there was a chance to catch him she was going to do it.

Only the danger became more pronounced when they still couldn’t find anything genuinely damning and he became more obsessive.

“Ham,” she said over dinner with him—her heart ready to beat out of her chest and her palms so sweaty she couldn’t hold her fork properly, “we need to talk.”

His smile, not quite right, faltered. “What’s wrong babe?”

Jane’s plan had been to slowly back away from the relationship until he gave it up, but Gregg had only grown more intense. He showed up at the hospital and found her apartment even though she’d been very careful never to show him where she lived. He grew…clingier as she pulled further away.

So she’d moved onto her own plan, breaking up with him like a normal person. “I don’t think,” how did one tactfully end things with finality, “I’ll be coming over anymore.”

He didn’t blink. The odd smile on his face was crafted from stone. “Excuse me.”

“I’ve had fun,” she tried to sound earnest, “but I think we should dial it back.”

Yeah. Act like it wasn’t a break up but a cooling off period.

“Have I…done something?”

Murdered children? 

“No.”

“So…”

Work. She was a surgeon. She was always busy. “It’s just, I’m going out for chief resident and that requires a lot of time. Time that I can’t divide with a boyfriend.”

“Okay.”

And it was done. She said she needed space and he accepted it. It had been easier than she’d expected. Easier than Jane had expected. The taser she’d pointedly put in Arizona’s purse wouldn’t be necessary.

She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

Gregg stood up and moved to stand before her. “You want me to take your plate,” he asked politely.

She nodded. He had to stoop to pick it up. Had to invade her space a little. 

His fingers grazed the edge of the plate before slamming into the table beside it. He leaned in so close she could see the spot on his neck where he’d missed shaving. 

“Who are you sleeping with,” he asked urgently.

“Ham…” 

The hand on the table reached up to grab her chin. His fingers dug painfully into her skin.

“Who,” he growled.

The biggest risk Arizona ever took? Not sharing a meal with the monster nearly choking her, but leaving the taser in her purse all the way over on the couch.

 

####

The apartment stank of blood. It had dried into a dark stain on the floor and flecks of brown matter covered the wall near the door except for one human sized clean spot. That must have been where Callie was standing.

Dr. Isles mutely offered a pair of gloves that Arizona took in a daze and then carefully stepped around the largest concentrations of blood.

“You know I’ve…I’ve never seen a person survive this much blood loss,” Dr. Isles—Maura noted.

It had been substantial.

“I suppose it’s something about Jane. She has a tenacity that is awe inspiring.”

Arizona only nodded and watched the other woman move around the room.

“I notice a lot of East African influences in the decor.”

Sure. In amongst the sippy cups, forgotten toys and general refuse that built up in the home of two upper middle class surgeons with a toddler there was a single piece of artwork she’d brought back from Malawi. It was hardly substantial evidence of an influence.

At least the other woman narrowed down the region of the giant continent she suspected the statue was from. Most people simply said “Africa” as though it were a small homogeneous nation rather than a continent with dozens of different tribes and nations.

“It’s just the one piece from Malawi.”

“Fascinating. I’ve always had a interest in the region myself. Have you been there?”

She was glad Callie wasn’t with them because though she’d forgiven Arizona the Malawi breakup (colloquially referred to as her trip to Africa precisely because Callie knew it was a pet peeve) she still liked to make little comments about that separation. It usually involved an eye roll and a healthy dose of teasing sarcasm.

“I have. I actually had a grant to work there. But then I had a daughter and my wife was in an accident and…I oversee as much as I can from here and fly over every three months.”

“The Carter Madison Grant correct? I remember reading about that. The first American woman to ever be awarded it.”

And the first person under the age of 45 **and** the first lesbian. 

“I’m a trailblazer,” she said brightly. 

Maura did not respond. She stood on the carpet between the couches and the coffee table but was staring into the kitchen. Arizona followed her gaze to a half full bottle of beer, now flat and stale after a day exposed to the open air.

She didn’t usually drink beer. She preferred wine, but Callie loved a good brew and Jane, while never a microbrewery nut, always enjoyed expensive ones if someone else was buying.

It was likely her beer. She’d probably come home from the police station and wearily gone to the fridge for a little respite from the twenty-four seven roller coaster of emotion that was their reunion. She’d drunk some of it.

And then Gregg had been there.

“Don’t think too much,” the other woman whispered.

“Excuse me?”

“I find that when I know the victim it’s best not to empathize with them too much while reviewing the crime scene.”

“So you just turn it off?” Maybe that’s what separated a forensic pathologist from a surgeon. Both were certainly required, at times, to shy from empathy. It did a patient no good on the table or in the morgue. But surgeons had masks and sheets that made it easier. They had a room full of other nurses and doctors who could behave like a support group.

A pathologist had only their will, and they weren’t being asked to save lives. They were being asked to piece together the lives of the utterly broken.

“Not always.”

Morbid curiosity drove her next question. “Have you ever had to do this before? With Jane?”

Maura took a deep breath and Arizona thought she caught a hint of a tremor. “No. I mean—I’ve been in situations involving Jane where it would have been easier not to—to feel, but I’ve never done it before.”

“Jane used to say it was the hardest part. Seeing a victim and seeing where they died.”

“It’s not pleasant.”

Arizona had only seen the victims. Felt their lives ebb away because a twisted man had wanted to watch them slowly die. It had nearly broken her. Had driven her into actions drastically out of character. Chipped away at her professionalism and emotions until there was only a wild and raw nerve.

Maura leaned over to look at one of Arizona’s wedding photos. In an instant the cool investigator had turned to voyeur. “If I may ask, how did you meet?”

“I kissed her in a dirty bar bathroom,” she said smugly. It had been one of her more dashing moments.

Maura stood up abruptly, “Jane?”

“What? No! My wife.”

“Oh.”

“You were asking—“

“I was—“

“At the hospital. Children’s.”

Maura took that in. “Was she…”

Arizona took a wild leap, “Gay?”

And succeeded. Maura nodded and tried to look curious without looking curious.

“She knew. But she’d never really dated a woman until me.”

“And apparently none since,” she said tightly.

“Apparently.”

Maura gestured emphatically as she crossed the room, “It’s just she never said anything. She acted…well somewhat…straight, and she always limited her interest entirely to men and I just assumed…but she wasn’t in the closet either was she? Because Korsak knew and the records I read regarding your first interaction with Gregg suggest that other officers knew. So why?”

“Go back in the closet?” She didn’t know. She never could have done it herself. “You’ll have to ask Jane that when she wakes up.”

 

####

In the movies a violent act was easy to understand. Shot with a number of cameras and then dissected and reformed by a director and editors it told a linear story.

In real life it wasn’t so easy to comprehend in the moment. Even months later it wouldn’t be a reel for film but a smattering of images and emotions all competing for comprehension.

His hand was on her jaw and digging painfully into her skin and then she was flying back and her head was hitting the ground and the crack in the ceiling seemed so far away.

He yelled. It was worse then when her father was mad. Worse than the drunks who’d find their ways to the ER at two in the morning. His eyes were screwed up in rage and his whole face was red and she was rolling onto her hands and knees and trying to get to her purse. She could see it—further even than the crack in the ceiling.

Then she was looking upwards again and her scalp was on fire.

 

####

She’d managed to convince herself it would be easy.

Being in the hospital with Jane. That had been hard, but with just enough familiarity that she hadn’t cracked. She’d remained strong for Angela and for herself.

But being in the apartment where it had happened was different. It wasn’t like those other attacks. The vestiges of Jane’s shooting had disappeared in a heavy rain that very night. And when either of them had been attacked in their own home they’d had…

They’d had each other. Maura had leaned on Jane and Jane had leaned on Maura and they’d found solace in their friendship. The brightness of it had kept the dark thoughts at bay.

But in Arizona Robbins’ apartment there was only the darkness and the blood. It had dried and clung to the floor forming cracks and crevices like mud baked in the sun.

Jane’s blood. Wrenched from her body by a mad man’s knife.

It was almost impossible to grasp. More than a week before she’d been furious with Jane. She’d legitimately hated her. But now she couldn’t even understand those emotions or the woman who’d held them.

How could she hate Jane? 

In the kitchen Robbins had found a trash bag and was disposing of the entire contents of the fridge. Fresh fruit, a whole piece of salmon and the rest of the case of beer all went in.

She was cleaning it out. Her home had been violated and she was methodically disposing of anything he might have come into contact with.

“How may I help?”

Robbins paused with a container of yoghurt in her hand. “I thought you wanted to investigate the scene.”

She had. She’d come with her in the hopes of seeing some clue the police may have missed. Grasping some angle that proved illusive to others. But then she’d seen the blood. Normally it would have been immediately characterized as a reddish brown stain.

But it wasn’t. It was Jane’s blood and the investigation she’d felt pressed to pursue had suddenly not seemed quite as urgent.

She said nothing though. She was unsure of how she could possibly convey her current emotions without seeming fickle and silly to the other woman. The woman who had once nearly married her best friend.

Robbins snapped another trash bag out of the roll she had on the counter. “You can go into the bathrooms and toss everything.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Ham—Gregg has a history of drugging his victims. I’d rather be safe.”

 

####

As a surgeon her hands meant everything. They were her livelihood and she had a natural instinct to protect them. But she also had an instinct to protect her head so she balled her hands tightly into fists and hoped her arms would catch more blows than her hands or head.

It was a gamble. Another risk in a long line. He was shouting with each blow and when he thought she couldn’t hear him he grabbed her arms and tugged her towards him to shout some more.

The little girl on the playground came out and her leg lashed out and connected with his groin. Soft tissue was crushed beneath her blow. The air whooshed out of his lungs as he nearly collapsed onto her.

But that wouldn’t work. He’d still be close.

She pushed him away and he sort of slumped against the floor.

The taser. It was still in her purse. 

She tried to force herself up but her arm couldn’t support her so she crawled. She couldn’t stand. She didn’t think she remembered how. She just had to get to the bag. It was so close. Within reach.

Her fingers reached out and the tips touched leather.

But his vice-like grip was on her leg and he was dragging himself up her body.

 

####

She had put Hamilton Gregg out of her mind a long time ago. Somewhere between agreeing to Jane’s proposal and Timothy’s death she’d stopped being haunted by that man.

Seeing Jane again could have brought it all back. Hearing he’d run out on his parole **should** have brought it all back. But it hadn’t. She’d been so busy dancing around her wife and then actually talking to her wife that she hadn’t had time to really be scared or find herself falling into memories best forgotten.

Standing in her kitchen throwing out every single item in her fridge brought it back though. He’d broken two ribs, cracked her arm and fractured her orbital socket. Not to mention the taser. He already knew how to use one and just the right amount of electricity to send arcing through a person’s system to keep them conscious but incapacitated.

But she’d put it all behind her. Seeing stun guns didn’t cause her to shiver. The loud and angry didn’t put her back in that apartment. She’d had eight years to process and overcome it and she’d done such a tremendous job of it.

But her hands were shaking a little. Maybe with anger or fear or a potent combination. He’d violated her home and nearly killed someone she cared about and Callie—he’d been close enough to touch Callie. Her wife. He could have hurt her too.

Arizona prided herself on her resilience but she knew it would have been lost if Callie had been hurt. The car crash was enough a dozen times over. She’d avoided getting behind the wheel for over a month. Until Mark forced her to go car shopping so they’d have a reasonable car to drive Sofia around in.

Her wife had nearly died.

Maura returned from her bathroom adventures with a half full trash bag that slinked with every step. “I had to throw away La Mer. If that wasn’t yours then tell your wife I’m sorry.”

Arizona gave her a tight smile. “It’s mine actually.” Callie got her for her every year on her birthday. She never wanted to spend the money on it herself so Callie did it for her.

Maura set her trash bag down and put her hands on her hips and appraised Arizona’s apartment once more. Though Arizona noted she avoided looking at the stain that still needed to be cleaned up.

“Jane was staying with you,” she asked.

Arizona opened the freezer and examined the contents. Would he have tampered with the frozen peas? Could he have?

“She was.”

Oh the tequila and the vodka. Those had to go. She plucked up both bottled and then threw them into the trash bag with a satisfying smash.

“I was thinking I should take her things to the hospital. For when she wakes up.”

She shut the freezer. The smell of the tequila wafted up from the bag and assaulted her nose. She was doing such a good job compartmentalizing things. Callie was okay and she clung to that. **Sofia** was okay and she clung to that too. Jane…Jane was alive and like Schrodinger’s cat in a quantum state of endless possibilities. Something like taking her things to the hospital and bring her flowers and being there when she woke up would only ruin things. Shatter the state and bring the possibility of tragedy ever closer.

“I think she was keeping them in Sofia’s room,” she said. Her voice was strong. No sense of the wavering she felt on the inside.

“Your daughter,” Maura said. As if she were trying to take Arizona’s mind off their task and their situation.

“Yes.”

“I saw the photos. She’s adorable.” Or maybe she was doing it for herself. Her compliment was perfunctory—not sincere. “I’ll go get them.”

She quickly danced around the stain.

Arizona sealed her bag and pulled the bucket out from underneath the sink. She put in far more pine scented cleaner than was necessary, turned the water up to the highest heat it could produce straight from the tap and proceed to fill the bucket up.

 

####

Maura would only admit it to Jane but she didn’t often understand people. Yes, she could view them analytically. Dissect them physically and emotionally, but she lacked that “gut” sense Jane had. Because of that sometimes she just couldn’t see it. Like her fath—like Paddy O’Doyle. She could never reconcile his two halves and had instead chosen to blindly embrace him with the knowledge that Jane, Frost and even Korsak had some measure of respect for him.

And then Jane had shot him and she’d sat by his side when she wasn’t sitting by her mother’s. That final day before Jane had been hurt and she’d flown across the country she’d talked to him.

“But you wouldn’t have shot her.” She’d treated it like fact. Her father and her best friend had stared at one another down the barrel of a gun and then Jane had fired and her father had fallen. Jane’s fabled “gut” had been wrong.

“Yeah,” he’d muttered painfully, “I would have.”

See. An excellent example. Jane’s gut had been correct and Maura’s own mixture of logic and empathy had failed miserably.

She was wary then to judge Arizona Robbins. Or to even understand her. The woman in the kitchen operated like a machine. The emotions she’d seen roiling beneath the surface outside the elevator and in Angela’s presence had disappeared and a steely pragmatism had taken hold.

In the other room she heard water pouring into a bucket and resisted a shudder. She found Jane’s things, hidden behind a rocking chair. She quickly unzipped the bag to take a cursory look of its contents.

But there on top was Jane’s gun.

She took it out. Jane’s voice was in her ear and her hands on her arms. Guiding her through the motions of checking the chamber and magazine. It was loaded. The chamber was clear. The safety was on. She removed the magazine, doubled checked the chamber once more because she was a little bit terrified of guns and always handled them suspiciously, and then carefully smelled the barrel.

Just gun oil. A scent she associated with Jane. They’d get together and drink wine and sit on the couch and watch old movies and Jane would hunch over her gun, laid out on the coffee table, and methodically clean it. Sometimes she’d run a greasy hand over Maura’s forearm and laugh when Maura would jump up in alarm.

Her phone was in there too, and out of habit more than anything else she turned it on.

In the other room she heard a wet sponge splash water onto the floor.

The phone eventually turned on and promptly asked for a password. A few different choices for a four digit code rattled through her head. Including a new option of Arizona Robbin’s birthday. But she instead settled on the jersey numbers of Jane’s two favorite Red Sox and felt a thrill of satisfaction when it flicked open on her first try.

She switched to the calls section and noticed that the most recent ones, excluding two to Korsak and the one Maura had received, were all to Seattle numbers. Though no name had been added.

That too made Maura more than a little pleased. Though she didn’t care to analyze why exactly she’d be jealous of Arizona Robbins’ relationship with Jane or why she’d in turn be pleased to see that Jane hadn’t bothered to add her number to her contact list.

Her texts were more of the same. A few to Frost, a whole novella’s worth to Frankie and a very boring thread between her and either Robbins or her wife discussing what should be prepared for dinner.

In the living room the sponge was being run furiously over a stain. Robbins grunted in frustration.

She flicked over to photos. Jane was fond of taking crime scene photos with her phone. There were only two new images. One a self portrait in front of a house fire. Jane was covered in soot and cuts—cuts she remembered were still fresh. Robbins was a blur in the background holding something to the back of her head and talking with an EMT.

The other one wasn’t a photo, but a video.

Though possessing little intuition on her own and preferring logic Maura still felt a sense of unease as she pressed her thumb to the video. It grew large. She flipped the phone and it took up the whole screen. It stuttered a moment as the phone’s processor struggled to load enough of the video then it started.

It was Jane sitting on the couch in the other room. She was healthy, but it was after whatever event had given her the cuts.

And she wasn’t holding the phone.

A low voice mumbled something and Jane said her name.

It mumbled something else.

She said the date. Yesterday. Before Gregg ran a knife across her throat.

The phone moved and the voice became clearer. “And who am I Officer Rizzoli?”

“It’s detective now you son of a bitch.”

She was tense on the couch. Her whole body coiled to attack. And defiant…though that was a trait Jane carried with her even when handling babies and small children.

“The fact that you’re employed by the police at all is disgusting. You assaulted me.”

“You beat Arizona. Nearly killed her.”

“Because she lied!”

Her fingers tightened around the phone. This was Gregg. This was Hamilton Gregg on the phone. Just a tinny phone speaker between her and a monster.

The scrubbing outside stopped.

“She pretended she liked me. Loved me. For what? For a game?”

“Because you were killing children.”

A bitter laugh reverberated through her hand. “You still think I killed those kids.”

“I know you did.”

“Like you knew you two would be together. My lawyer tells me you’re together and getting married. Then my lawyer tells me you’re apart. You finally get fed up eating her—“

“Go to hell.”

“Her new wife is pretty. I mean, if she’s gonna go with women at least she picked a good one.” The camera, and Gregg, came closer to Jane. “How much do you think she’ll cry when you die?”

“Killing me won’t hurt her.”

Silence.

“You guys think I like to experiment right. Stick those kids out in pits and watch them die?”

The scars on Jane’s hands were bright against the skin of her balled up fists. “So here’s an experiment. Which will make Arizona cry more? Your death? Or her wife’s?”


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are certain things in this story I had planned from day one. The last line of this chapter? Totally one of those things.

The sound of Arizona hitting the floor sent Jane running. She was out of the car and her feet pounding the pavement in seconds. Under her breath she cursed Arizona, herself and their damned stupid idea.

Arizona hadn’t told her the plan before going in. She’d just smiled coyly and said she’d figure it out and Jane should have known—she should have **known** —that it was just Arizona’s false bravado surfacing to comfort Jane. But she’d ignored it and stayed out in the car.

Then Arizona had tried to break up with Gregg and everything turned to hell.

She could hear the violence over the one earbud still tucked into her ear and it roiled her stomach. She pulled her gun as her long legs ate the stairs up two at a time. Training took over. Her foot stung as it connected with the door which wrenched open with a scream of bending wood and metal.

Gregg paused, his bloodied fists raised above his head like hammers.

She shouted. Prayed that he wouldn’t move. That she wouldn’t have to fire.

The fists came down.

The smell of sulfur filled her nose as her gun went off.

 

####

Callie avoided Jane’s room for most of the day. She walked by twice. The first time Jane’s mother and friend were both there. The second time it was just her mother and she was sitting by Jane’s bed holding Jane’s hand in one hand and flipping through a magazine on her knees with the other.

Callie **did** spend lunch and a break between surgeries down in the nursery with her own daughter. Sofia was too young to understand what had happened but Bailey, Derek and Meredith all happened to be down in the nursery during lunch as well and they gave her sympathetic looks

Mark scrubbed in on her two o’clock hand surgery but more to make sure she was okay than to actually help with the surgery.

By four Callie’s surgeries were done but she was still on call so she migrated to Owen’s ER. “Anything good?”

Owen looked surprised to see her. “You’re not taking an early day?”

She might have, but Arizona was cleaning their apartment with Maura Isles and she wasn’t eager to help, or to be in the apartment again any time soon. “I want to work. I **need** to work Owen.”

She gave her words a little bit of that comedic frantic edge she possessed and he smiled good-naturedly, “Sure,” he glanced at the board, “Kepner’s in with a nasty set of fractured metacarpals in two.”

“I’ll take it.” She jogged over and picked up the chart outside the door, which listed the patient as John Doe.

Inside a man who likely hadn’t seen a shower, razor or a roof over his head in a very long time was drunkenly pushing Kepner away and demanding another doctor. Kepner saw her and sighed. “Thank goodness. He’s refusing to let me—“

The man pushed her back then lurched around, “I want another doctor,” he slurred through the matted hair of his beard. 

Callie did a good job of not wrinkling her nose in disgust. She’d gotten very good at it over the years of dealing with drunks who showed up in the ER. Though usually it wasn’t still the afternoon.

“Sir,” she said carefully. 

He eyed her and calmed measurably, “You, you’re better.”

Kepner was too busy being relieved to be insulted.

“Thank you, but we still need to get you down to X-Ray to look at your hand.”

He nodded, “Okay.”

“Dr. Kepner,” she looked sharply at the younger doctor who was wildly shaking her head no, “will take you. And then you’ll come back here to me,” she unloaded a full wattage smile, “Okay?”

He looked suspiciously at Kepner and she noticed that under the dirty beard and hair there was an attractive man. She could see it in his bone structure.

“Okay,” he said, still calm.

 

####

“That was him wasn’t it?”

Maura spun around to find Robbins standing in the door. She’d exchanged her short gloves for large cleaning gloves that went up past her elbows. The sponge she’d been using to clean up was still clutched in her hand and pink water dripped from its edges.

She nodded at the phone in Maura’s hand. “I heard voices,” she explained.

“Oh.”

“So was it?”

“It was.”

Robbins’ face was still cool but she could see the tears forming at the corner of her eyes. She suspected the only reason Robbins’ hadn’t cried was because her jaw was clinched so.

She held the phone up. “It was in her bag.”

“Because he left it for us.”

Maura didn’t believe in leaps of logic. She certainly couldn’t say for certain that it was left for them to find. He might have left it by accident. Or planned to come back for it. It was just one leap she refused to take. “I don’t know.”

“Play it again.”

It wasn’t a request. Maura held it up so Robbins could see and then looked away. She tried to think about something else even as she felt the speaker thrum against her palm as the conversation played out.

When it went silent she pulled the phone back and turned it off then hazarded a look up. Robbins was crying now. Angry tears. When she saw was Maura watching she immediately turned around and left the room.

 

####

Arizona had always had a bit of a dashing rescuer complex. Not a knight because she heard the armor pinched and she preferred pretty form fitting dresses to bulky armor. Just a rescuer. She liked to save kids. Liked to defend the weak on the playground. In relationships she was always the one making the first move because she loved to watch a woman swoon.

But Jane didn’t have such a complex. She simply **was** a white knight, riding in on her horse and wielding a fiery sword and ready to slay some dragons. It took her a minute to realize one of the loud noises she’d heard hadn’t been Gregg’s fists but Jane smashing open the door and shooting him in the shoulder. Her righteous protector straight out of a fantasy.

She’d curled up in a ball trying to will away the pain that she used to call a body. But a cool and friendly hand dragged her out of the depths with a touch to her shoulder. It was immediately gentle and calming. Instantly she knew she’d been saved and looked up through the one eye that was still open. 

“Right on time,” she said through split lips.

Jane smiled back and Arizona followed her perfect form right down her arm to the gun she still held out and trained on him. He’d dropped the taser when Jane’s bullet hit and Arizona dragged it towards them with conservative movements in her fingers.

Jane flipped her phone open and made a call, then she leaned down so only Arizona could hear her. “Did he see the mic?”

“No,” she croaked. She tried to tug it out from her blouse but her hands weren’t working right yet.

Jane gently reached in and pulled it out, wrapping the mic around its battery pack and shoving it into her pocket. Right. Because the cops were coming and if it looked like they’d entrapped him…even in Boston judges might not be so nice to a pair of lesbians manipulating a school teacher.

 

####

Kepner returned with the films and a still subdued patient. Callie accepted the films, “How was it?”

“He only called me something not nice twice,” April said brightly.

The man waved her off and Kepner left.

“Looks like you did **not** make a friend,” she observed.

“She’s too perky.”

Truer words had never been spoken.

Callie turned back to the lightbox and spread the films out. Ouch. 

“What happened?”

“Slammed my hand in a door,” he mumbled.

On purpose? She’d never seen that kind of damage from a full grown man accidentally slamming his hand in a door. It was going require surgery to realign all the broken bones. She ran through the gear she’d need in her head and pulled out a pen and pad to quickly jot down some notes.

“We’re going to have to do surgery to fix all this? You might want to think about suing that door.”

“No. I don’t think I will.”

Something about his voice. Familiar. Brutally calm. She slowly turned because if she turned to fast her suspicions would be confirmed and she’d be terrified.

It was Hamilton Gregg standing there under a fake beard and a lot of filth. He’d done something to the door. Shut the shades and was looking so calmly at her.

“Now we’re alone.”

And all Callie could say was, “Oh.”

 

####

Robbins had walked straight into the kitchen, stripped off her gloves and pulled out her phone. Her path had taken her through the half-cleaned stain and tracks of soap and Jane’s blood were a muddy color on the floor.

She perked up as soon as someone answered on the other side of the phone, “Hello! Detective Williams. This is Dr. Robbins. We found something you missed.” Shock had given away to sharp anger that oozed out of the other woman. She listened, “First you suspected Jane and I. Then he nearly killed her and now he’s leaving messages for us in my daughter’s room. How **should** I feel precisely?”

Maura carefully moved around the stain and found a small ziplock bag which she dropped the phone into. She then resumed her search in the nursery. Only it seemed too be clean. The only evidence of his presence was the phone.

Arizona’s conversation ended with a curt goodbye and she returned to the doorway. “Find anything else?”

“Nothing. Which suggests that he either left the phone as a complete accident…”

“Or as a message,” she said softly.

“Exactly. I’m afraid you know him better than I do. Is he…fond of leaving messages?”

Robbins ran her hand over her chest and recalling something Maura had only read about. “Very,” she said. “He wanted us to find it.”

She looked down at her phone. “And I just called Callie because, he threatened her and she should know but she isn’t answering her phone. That’s normal, you know? We’re doctors and we have surgeries and sometimes we just leave our phones in our lockers, but why would she do that after yesterday…”

“It’s perfectly natural to worry about her.”

“I brought this here. Jane and I did something **so stupid** when we were young and now she’s in the hospital and my wife had to trade days of worrying about me and Mark getting along for worrying about a serial killer.”

She tried to ask it as gently as possible, “Do you want to go check on her?” 

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” She looked around for her purse and remembered she’d left it by the front door. “I’ll come with you.”

“You don’t have to…”

“But I do. We don’t know where he is and if he did leave this by accident I’d rather not be here alone when he comes back for it.”

 

####

No one in the force knew they were dating. Jane had been a little reluctant to out herself so early in her career and Arizona had obliged—though a little unwillingly. It made it easier to tell the lie that day though.

A car showed up minutes after her call. They helped her secure Gregg while waiting for an ambulance. A detective arrived shortly afterwards and Jane went into her story of hearing the violence while getting out of her car and arriving just in time to save Arizona. 

The detective asked Arizona what happened and she moaned about wanting to break up. It was an easy lie with all the truth behind it. The ambulance came, Jane rode with them. She waited at the hospital and stared at the ceiling and wondered just how they could have been so stupid. Their attempt to stop a killer had nearly killed Arizona and if the truth came out it would cost Jane her career.

But it wouldn’t. It couldn’t. There were so many easy lies to explain it all away. So many ways to convince the detective, the DA and a jury that they were victims and Gregg was the monster.

It was just… It was so easy to lie.

Only Korsak showed up at the hospital. He didn’t look at her sympathetically but glared before he fell into the chair beside hers with a huff. “I get this call. ‘Don’t you know that Rizzoli girl,’ he asks. ‘Yeah I do.’ And he tells me how you were picking up your friend after she breaks up with a guy and you hear all that violence and walk right in and save the day.”

Her voice was rough, “Yeah.” A challenge. She waited.

“Only your friend isn’t so straight Rizzoli, and that apartment you two are sharing isn’t built for roommates.”

She turned to study him and found him focusing just as intently on her. She’ grown used to being the one investigating. It was funny to be on the other side. “What are you implying?”

“I’m thinking you were upset you couldn’t find evidence to link him to those girls. So you two came up with a half-assed plan to go undercover and it blew up in your face.”

It was the moment. Her career—her whole future rode on how she responded to him. She could keep lying. Tell him it all happened as she described. That they were just friends and her interest in him as a suspect and Arizona’s “attraction” to him were all coincidences. 

But Jane had grown up with not a lot. Yet she’d always had her honor and her parents, her mom especially, had always taught her to do the right thing even when it hurt like hell and was harder than pushing a rock up a hill like that one dead guy. So she could keep on lying, but it wouldn’t be right and that honor she clung to wouldn’t be hers to claim.

“I…”

Korsak suddenly leaned back and waved his hand, “But that’s pretty dumb right? That’s the kind of thing that would cost an incredible cop like yourself her job. Wouldn’t it?”

Was he threatening her? Absolving her? She couldn’t even form words.

“It my brain. I’m a detective you know? We like to tell stories. Make our own narratives. We give ‘em to the DA and the public and we make people believe ‘em. We give them proof and we ask to go along.”

“Detective Korsak…”

“The way I see it you and your friend will probably realize you love each other after all this. Fall in love. Maybe get married. Gregg. Gregg will go to jail. Those girls in the pit? Well they might be the last and we’ll all sigh in relief and the case will go t the bottom of my drawer for eight or ten years.”

She swallowed.

“You know, this guy, he was too smart for us. It’s been a month with no movement. I’m getting told I need to just let it go. Move onto cases I can solve. Where girls have names and families and there’s a killer I can actually find. So it’s nice coming down here and seeing you Jane. Knowing you and your friend, at least, put away one monster.”

 

####

“You know who I am?”

Yes. She’d seen him fleetingly in her apartment. She’d barely been able to look at him a second before he’d opened Jane’s throat and runaway. But there was a snapshot of his face in her head. A perfect image of his casual stare as his knife split apart the skin of Jane’s neck.

“I do.”

He stood between Callie and her only way out of the exam room. But he’d done something to the door too. So even if she could make it past him she’d be stuck. So she stepped back. Put space between herself and him and took comfort knowing he probably didn’t have a gun on him. Maybe not even a knife.

“And I know you. Read all about you. Saw the pictures from your wedding. Saw how much she managed to love you.”

“So why…”

“Didn’t I do anything the other day? Because Calliope Torres I’m to make your wife suffer.”

She wanted to punch him. The way he took satisfaction in her name. The way he luxuriated in the double L and the double R. Giving them a spanish flare that was meant to mock her. All it did was take her back to elementary school Spanish. The alphabet. Sitting in the classroom reciting the twenty-seven letters until they were apart of her. Putting logic to the chaos that was the language she used at home.

 A, Be, Ce, De.

“Spent a long time planning this Calliope. Long time figuring out how you and I could be alone together.”

E, Efe, Ge, Hache.

“Mr. Gregg? Please.”

I, Jota, Ka.

“After Jane I know I’m going back to jail. But I knew that as soon as I skipped bail. Its not about being free Calliope. It’s about being happy.”

Ele, Eme, Ene, Eñe.

“Please.”

O, Pe, Cu.

“Killing you and letting poor Arizona find the body? That’s happiness.”

Erre.

 

####

They didn’t quite run back to the hospital. But it wasn’t a walk either. A speedwalk maybe. Something more fit for a marathon. Arizona pulled out her phone again and dialed again.

“Mark? Have you see Callie?”

“Sure. She’s down here in the Pit treating some broken hand.”

“She’s not answering her phone. Could you grab her real quick?”

Normally Mark would have said no, but he must have been feeling magnanimous with everything going on. “No problem Robbins.” He didn’t even tease her.

She heard him shout out to Kepner and heard her respond—though she was too far from the phone for Arizona to make out what she was saying.

“Gimme a sec. Hey your friend woke up for about half a second earlier. You gonna see her today?”

“Maybe. Callie?”

“Right,” Mark grunted as he pushed on a door. “Huh,” he muttered, “It’s stuck.”

Arizona’s heart stopped. Literally. For an instant longer than healthy it simply stopped beating and with it the world around her crashed to a halt. The mist that was a Seattle afternoon in winter turned so still she could see every droplet of water in front of her. The person snuffing out a cigarette ahead of her. The person buying a coffee. Meredith Grey and Avery leaving after a forty-eight hour shift their feet not quite touching the ground as they froze in the moment.

There was no air. No sound. No hum of blood in her ears. There was nothing.

Then the world was moving forward again and she was running. Running faster then she did whenever a patient was coding. Running so fast she couldn’t even fathom the mechanism of her locomotion. There was only forward movement.

She had to get to Callie.

She had to save her.

 

####

Callie and her sister were never supposed to fight. Aria was six years older: her sister from her mom’s first marriage. As kids she’d had those six precious years and about a foot on Callie. So any attempts at combatting injustice with a healthy dose of sister punching led to her being sat on, or locked in a closet or one time hog tied by her sister and her best friend and hidden in the trundle bed for thirty minutes.

Their parents had called a moratorium on the combat when they realized the BB gun they’d given Callie for her eighth birthday was to be used in a full frontal assault on her sister’s rear end.

That saw the end of Callie’s fighting days until puberty hit. She gained height on her sister. But Aria was in college by that point and had no time for mortal combat. 

But Todd. Flipping Todd who sat in front of her in English class and made snide comments like he’d never met a Latina girl before. Or any girl for that matter. Which was ridiculous because it was a coed school and they were in Florida. Everyone hated Todd. Well, every girl and the teacher.

The guys thought he was hilarious with his borderline crude and cruel comments. They were always just nice enough to avoid punishment from the teacher. She couldn’t, after all, punish him simply for being an asshole.

Then one day he said something. Callie couldn’t even remember what. Just something awful. And stupid. And repulsive. And she’d stood up, wrapped her hands around his throat and squeezed until he turned purple. Then she let go and sat back down.

No one, not even the teacher, said a word. It was the simplest form of justice and her hands had exacted it. Given her a taste for violence.

She got in a few brawls after that. Nothing devastating. She wasn’t suddenly the bad kid out for a rumble. Just the weird one. And the brawls were less brawls and more minor altercations—some good shoves and one knee to the groin at a club when a guy wouldn’t listen. The last time she’d really gotten violent it was because of George. George and the panties and Mark and Meredith in the locker room. And George and the dead woman and her controlling boyfriend in the rain.

Meeting Arizona, **loving** Arizona, had washed all the urge for violence right out of her. So she wasn’t only out of practice when it came to violence, she actually found it a little foreign.

When Gregg lunged it took her brain a minute to catch up with the action. She stepped back. Reached for something. Anything. But he was on her. Throwing her into the wall and trying to crack her in the temple with his fist.

She held her arms up for protection. Just like she used to with Aria. A blow to the temple would be the end. Not because of the damage, but because of the opportunity it would give him.

Watching boxing matches with Hunt in the lounge sprang to mind. She knew what was happening. She was against the ropes. So she did what any good fighter would do, and lunged.

 

####

Mark and Arizona didn’t always communicate well. Maybe because for most of the time they’d known each other they hadn’t actually **liked** each other. But having Callie and Sofia as commonalities had made them both a little better at reading the other one.

Like her silence on the line. Once he’d have read it as irritation. But he knew she was worried. He knew she **should** be worried. So he’d quietly hung up and slipped the phone into his pocket then motioned to Kepner. 

“Get security,” he said in a low voice.

Kepner looked from him to the door for just an instance before breaking into a full run.

He brought his hand up to the door. Let his knuckles hover over the metal. He could be over-thinking things. Could be letting Arizona and the attack get to him. He could—his knuckles rapped sharply on the door.

“Yo Torres,” he said as casually as normal, “open up.”

He waited. Hoped, but did not pray that the door would open and she’d be standing there looking confused. Didn’t pray because he wasn’t religious. Callie was. Callie was a little Catholic. He hoped they didn’t need her god. Didn’t need some higher power on the other side of that door.

Something clattered to the ground on the other side. Someone, a woman, grunted in pain.

Mark stepped back, lifted his foot for a kick, and finally prayed.

 

####

Callie and Gregg both went down hard but Callie was already moving again. Scrambling over the man and rushing towards the door. She yanked on it but it refused to budge. There was no time to figure out what he’d done to it. She slapped her open palm again the door and prayed someone on the other side heard.

It shook violently then a voice. “Callie?”

Mark! She cried out for him to help.

“Hold on!”

He threw his foot or body or something against the door, but the stupid thing was metal in a metal frame and barely moved.

Gregg was up again and she knew it when hands snaked into her hair and yanked her back and away from the door. He let go before she could stabilize herself and she went tumbling to the ground again.

“Your wife framed me,” he accused her.

His beard was fake and coming off. She could see the spirit gum. It should have been ridiculous. A grown man dressing up to sneak into a hospital? It should have been silly. Injuring his hand—maiming himself just to get near her? Who did that?

But that was mania. Motivating a man to do more than he normally would have. Pushing him to do something insane. So why did she have the urge to engage him. To defend her wife in the onslaught of his madness?

“You beat her and nearly killed her.”

“She **used** me.”

The door shook again. Callie inched further back on her hands in half a crab walk.

“You killed a woman in Cle Elum. Did she use you too?”

His face didn’t exactly change. It didn’t contort with rage. The bloom of a furious blush didn’t spread across his face. But his jaw clenched. His eyes narrowed.

“And Jane Rizzoli? What did she do?”

“You know what she did,” he growled. 

She did. Arizona had told her. Told her how they hunted him in search of a killer and found something just as evil in its stead.

“I know her testimony put you in jail.”

“Did you know she stalked me? The two of them **played** me Calliope. Like a goddamned violin.”

She could play him too. That’s what she was doing. Playing him long enough for that door to open.

Her left hand brushed cool metal. The surgical tray that had fallen in their initial scuffle. 

He squatted down and grabbed her by the hair again. Forced her to look at him. He liked to be in control. She could see that clear as day. A man like him? He’d use anything he could to maintain control. 

She just had to make him lose it.

 

####

She rounded the corner to find Mark, Kepner, Karev and two security guards. Mark was leaning against the wall and Kepner had his foot on her thigh and was inspecting it.

“I think I broke it,” he winced.

Karev and the two security guards were taking turns slamming their shoulders against the door. “It’s frickin’ jammed,” Alex said. He rammed into it again.

Callie cried out on the other side of the door and it took everything in Arizona’s power not to collapse at the sound.

“The window,” someone muttered.

They all turned. Maura Isles was standing there and pointing past Arizona at the window. “We can get in through the window.”

At the wall Mark shook his head. “The whole point of those things is they don’t break easily.”

Alex grabbed an IV stand and hefted it like a bat. “Like hell they don’t.” 

 

####

Control. If she sent him into a spiral she could take a moment and maybe incapacitate him. Make him lose control. Play him like that violin.

“Eight years in prison and this is what you come up with? Hopeing to beat me before they break that door down?”

“Shut up.”

“And your hand. That’s gonna need surgery if you ever want to make a fist again. Otherwise you’ll just have to openly slap the women you beat.”

The sound of something slamming against the glass gave them both pause.

“Arizona…”

“Didn’t love you. But that’s not her fault. That’s yours. You’re the one that couldn’t take no. You really think you’re that amazing Gregg? Because what, you taught high school history.”

He couldn’t slap her. Not without hurting his hand more. So he tugged on her hair. 

It was unravelling. He was unravelling. 

“It’s all going down the drain now you know. Your great plan for revenge. You got greedy. Thought you’d get Jane and me. But you don’t get us goth Gregg.”

It was kismet then. From the other side of the door Arizona shouted her name. 

“You have to make a choice.”

Something broke through the glass and tore at the shades and Callie’s hand wrapped around the tray beneath her fingers and she swung hard. It wasn’t a heavy piece of metal. It wouldn’t hurt him, but the loud clang of it against his skull startled him enough that his grip on her hair loosened. She scrambled away. Slipped onto her back. 

He turned to grab her again. Frantic. The cool killer she’d found in her apartment had given way to the feral beast he kept tucked away.

She kicked hard. Her foot connected with his nose and even through her shoe she felt the bone crunch. She didn’t stop though. Her heel fell onto his bad hand. The one he’d injured just to get close to her. 

His scream was blood curdling.

She backed further away from him before climbing up the wall and leaning on a supply cart to catch her breath and try to slow her heart rate down. Someone yanked the shade over the window down and Arizona scrambled through followed by two security guards. 

She smiled at her wife. Arizona took in the scene before rushing to her side and hugging her so tight she thought her ribs might break.

Back at the window Karev surveyed the scene and took in Gregg, who was clutching his broken hand and spilling blood from his shattered nose all over the floor.

“Dude.”


	14. Chapter 14

She woke up with her mother and Maura hovering over her and she knew it was a dream because she’d left them both in Boston. Arizona leaned on the door frame with her arms crossed casually and her hair up and messy and a set of dark blue scrubs hanging off her frame. Her expression was… inscrutable.

Maura touched her cheek and she refocused her attention on her. “Jane, do you know where you are?”

“Seattle.” Right? She’d been in Seattle and then…and then he’d been in the apartment and she’d been so exhausted and stunned she’d barely managed a defense before he’d wrapped himself around her and pointed her at the door.

“Now we wait Jane,” he’d crooned in her ear.

She looked back at Arizona. Looked for signs of that trauma. No. No, her wife had been there. She closed her eyes and tried to see the past she could barely grasp. Callie Torres had been there and then she couldn’t breathe and the rain fell gently in the room and all of it was warm and red.

“That’s right,” Maura said. She looked at her again. “We’re in Seattle. You were,” she almost frowned even though Maura only frowned when puzzling out a problem or dealing with her mother, “You were attacked.”

You’re… “here?”

Maura smiled. “I am,” she said softly.

“Janie?”

Her mother was there too and sounded like she was watching one of her kids play baseball or something.

“Ma?”

She couldn’t really turn her head and she didn’t want to either. But her eyes flickered over to her mother who looked like she might be crying and was standing so close but seemed so terrified to touch her.

“I’m here Janie. I’m here.”

She closed her eyes and tried to swallow but her jaw and throat didn’t work quite right. “What happened,” she said. Only it was hard to even talk. Like her tongue didn’t want to move.

“You were hurt.” She’d expected Arizona to say it, but it was Maura. “But you’re safe now Jane.” Maura was holding her hand and squeezed it tight. “You’re safe here okay?”

She wanted to ask more but her brain kept working slower than it should and she felt too sleepy to properly talk to all of them. “Okay,” she found herself saying. Gregg was out there. He’d hurt her. She knew that. And he might have hurt Arizona’s wife. Might have even killed her. Maybe that was why Arizona was standing in the door like a stranger.

But Maura’s thumb was rubbing soothing circles over her wrist and the comfort spread out and up her arm. “You should get some rest.”

“Okay,” she said to that too.

Tears sprung up in Maura’s eyes. 

“Why are you crying?”

Maura shook her head and leaned over to press her lips to Jane’s forehead. “Sleep,” she whispered. Her breath was sweet. 

She tried to raise her hand to run it through Maura’s hair. Maura had wonderful hair. It was cruel fate that she only ever got to touch it when they were hugging each other and offering comfort. It’d be weird to just run her hand though it.

But her hand was moving too slow and Maura was moving too quickly away.

At the door Arizona ducked her head like she was about to give some parent bad news. 

Jane knew it wasn’t normal. Maura’s tears and Arizona’s distance and her mother just standing there watching her and too afraid to touch. But she was too tired to ask why.

And as her eyes drifted close she realized that maybe that was part of the problem.

 

####

Maura winked and leaned across the bed, “So are you going to go out with him?”

Sometimes talk to Maura was like talking to her mother—who was probably the only person more obsessed with her love life than Maura. Both of them got so hung up the moment she mentioned a guy. Her mom because it meant grandchildren and Maura because…well that was just Maura.

“Maybe.” She tried to keep her face impassive so Maura wouldn’t end up teasing her.

“He’s very attractive.”

“So are you, but you don’t see us on a date.” 

Oh.

Oh wow.

Good job Jane. Make another comment that sounds like you’re gay.

Maura just laughed obliviously. “We should go on a date!” What? Jane’s heart beat fast. “Then we could find some men who are actually interesting—and not cops.”

Jane’s heart was still beating out a samba.

Maura scooted closer and reached for Jane’s forehead. “Are you okay? You got all flushed all of a sudden.”

She had to nearly fly off the bed to avoid Maura’s fingers because the pathologist had really nice fingers that she sometimes fantasized trailing across her stomach while they gently kissed—“I’m fine.”

She wasn’t fine. She had all these feelings that weren’t fine. Feelings she was good at compartmentalizing. Pushing them down and away so she could keep her friend.

Because what would happen if she told her? What would happen if it all went to shit? She had a friend. A good friend. The best friend she’d ever had. So she had to push a part of herself down. Omit a few truths. She could do that to keep her.

Some part of her demanded it.

 

####

Working in the Pit Callie was used to dealing with cops. Some were power hungry jerks and some were just trying to help people and all of them were weary when they stepped through the doors and into her domain. Because it was one of the few places where a cop’s word wasn’t law. Medicine superseded it.

She’d been interviewed before. Usually while rushing around working on other patients. She’d had consults. She’d even testified in court.

But she’d never beaten down a fugitive and been interviewed afterwards. Williams insisted on speaking to her without Arizona. Kicked her wife out of the room and then assured Callie multiple times she didn’t need a lawyer and that it was all very informal.

And as it was all so very informal maybe she was a little more curt than necessary.

Though a more empathetic cop wouldn’t have blamed her. Twice in two days she’d been face to face with her wife’s stalker and an alleged serial murderer. Again she’d spoken with Williams. Again she’d put up with his suspicion and insinuations and again she’d told him to go sit on it and spin.

“You assaulted him.”

“I defended myself.”

Williams stared at her. “You need to understand that I’ve looked at the original case. I’ve spoken with people who know him.”

“Detective Williams I really hope you’re not suggesting that I somehow…lured him into the room and into attacking me.”

“I’m suggesting that a little girl is in the hospital and a woman in Cle Elum is dead and he might not be as responsible as we think.”

“You think…you think my wife is responsible?” 

He said nothing. Just studied her face.

“Look, I have no idea what **you** want Detective, but I am cooperating and have been cooperating and I really don’t like what you keep trying to insinuate. So let’s go ahead and clear the air.”

She was hoping that would be the end of it, but then Williams had to open his mouth, “I think Jane Rizzoli and your wife entrapped Gregg eight years ago. I think they’re either involved in the original murders or they know who are. And I think you’re one naive as hell woman if you think they’re even remotely innocent.”

“And I think we’re done,” she declared. Her whole body was on fire all over again. This time from an absolute wrath she didn’t even know she was capable of. She shot out of her chair. The feet of it scraped across the floor. “You have any other questions you might want to direct them to our attorney.”

She didn’t wait for him to protest. He’d protest either way. But she wasn’t going to sit in the room and let him create some vast conspiracy involving her wife just to satisfy his…his misogyny? Whatever it was that compelled him to side with a violent man over the women he’d hurt.

But she did pause at the door, “And you might want to call your union rep, because come tomorrow morning you can bet your ass I’m calling **your** boss.”

The anger didn’t abate when she was out of the room. Arizona wasn’t waiting for her and it hurt far more than she wanted it to. But Mark was. He was leaning against the wall fiddling with his phone and didn’t notice her.

“How’s your foot?”

He shoved his phone in his pocket and shook his foot gently. “Not broken. Arizona asked for me to wait for you.”

The anger dulled a little. She’d forgotten, in the fight for her life and the aftermath she’d heard something about Jane waking up. Arizona would have wanted to be there and Callie was trying to be secure enough to be okay with that choice.

“How is she?”

“Worried about you. Frazzled. A little sore I think too because she ran over here and that’s more a long distance thing and Robbins’ strictly a sprinter.”

“I meant Jane.”

His tone wasn’t quite as flippant, “Can’t really talk and I think there’s some paralysis. We won’t know more until the stroke docs do an assessment so it could be permanent or it couldn’t be.”

She closed her eyes and tried to think of the woman she’d met versus the woman she would see. She knew strokes. Not like a brain guy. More like her grandmother whose strokes hadn’t been severe at first. They’d limited her mobility a little. Then they’d slurred her speech. Then one day she was seeing a sister she’d lost in the thirties and didn’t understand who her living family were.

It wasn’t that. Jane was young and healthy and she could make a recovery. 

“Do you think—“ What? That she could have done more?

He leaned in so he could look her in the eyes, “This isn’t on you Torres.  She’s lucky to be **alive**.”

“But I froze,” her voice cracked, “when I saw him holding her I froze and I tasted her blood and what if I’d moved Mark?”

He sucked in a breath and narrowed his eyes. “In surgery? What would happen if you spent all your time retracing every step?”

“You become a better surgeon?”

“I mean it Torres,” he took her by the shoulders, “you can’t second guess yourself in the OR and you **can’t** second guess yourself on this.”

“I know,” she said firmly, “I know. I’m not. I’m just tired Mark and I want to go home. I want all this to be over and—“

Damn it. She’d been so good. She’d managed not to cry yet. 

“Hey,” he pulled her into a hug, “it’s okay Callie. It’s over. It’s all over.”

“But it isn’t,” she protested, “Jane is still here and Arizona—“

“Isn’t leaving you.”

“I’m terrified,” she whispered into his chest.

“I know.”

 

####

Mark texted her that Callie was out of her interview with Williams and she surreptitiously made her exit. Not that anyone noticed. Jane was sleeping again and her mother and best friend seemed reluctant to leave her side.

Heading towards the daycare Arizona spied Williams stalking towards her. They stopped just short of one another other.

“Your wife’s very loyal.”

She blinked. It was such an odd thing for him to say. 

He looked around them. Sniffed. Twitched his shoulder. “What I’m trying to understand is how you found that phone in your house and then knew exactly where he was.” His eyes were so focused on her.

She stepped back warily. “I would think the real question is how you missed that phone in the first place.”

Williams laughed a little and shoved his hands into his blazer pockets. “Wow. Really?” He took a step towards her. “Maybe you kept it back.” He leaned in. “See there’s a lot about all this I don’t like. I keep getting this feeling I’m a puppet—that Gregg’s a puppet and I look around,” he was so close she could see the brush of gray at his temples, “And all I see are you and Rizzoli. The two women who played him like a fiddle eight years ago.”

There were few things Arizona hated more than presumption. She lowered her voice. “You don’t know what happened then.”

“I know enough.”

But he couldn’t. No one knew what really happened except her and Jane. Even Gregg had only his ideas and accusations.

“You should be careful Detective. You’re looking for a bogeyman when the only one I know of had his hand crushed by my wife tonight.”

“I think,” he studied her and she stared back and tried not to blink, “that I’m gonna look for more little girls in holes. Here in Seattle and there in Boston. From before three weeks ago.”

He was accusing her. Accusing Jane. It wasn’t enough to be stalked by a killer? She had to have this cop coming after her too?

Someone could have chilled beer on her breath. “Good luck.” 

He shrugged, hands still in his pocket, and walked past her. “Tell your wife thanks,” he called over his shoulder.

Arizona shivered.

 

####

They rode up the elevator in silence and Mark wordlessly disappeared into his own apartment with their daughter. She and her wife were wordless too. The gloves lay in a pile next to a half cleaned stain and every light was still on. Callie stepped over the stain and pulled the other pair of latex gloves out from beneath the sink. She emptied the bucket of dirty browned water and refilled it and knelt before the stain.

Arizona stood frozen in the doorway watching her.

She dipped the sponge in gave it a single squeeze and then scrubbed.

“Callie.”

It was a soft sponge. No bristle on it to help work up debris so she really had to dig. Force her knuckles into the sponge to work at the stubborn edges of the stain.

“Callie, please.”

She let up just a little. If she pressed to hard the sponge would shred.

Arizona dropped her purse and keys. “I need you to look at me.”

“I just want to get this cleaned up,” she said.

“Callie.”

“What?” She looked up, “What am I supposed to say? Do?”

Arizona looked so plaintive, “Talk to me.”

“About Gregg attacking me? About you disappearing to be with your ex-fiancee? About our lives just being,” she ripped the sponge in frustration.

She knelt next to Callie, but didn’t touch her. “Just talk to me.” Arizona had such a problem with begging. She couldn’t do it really. She could try but it always turned into a passionate speech. Less begging and more an argument—a bargain for forgiveness. 

Yet every once in a while old habits failed her and something raw eked out from behind that wall she’d kept around herself as long as Callie’d known her. The woman Callie married would genuinely beg because there was nothing else and no purer expression of her desperation. Or her love.

Callie had to close her eyes because looking at her…

“Please.”

She chanced it. Dared herself to be brave and look at her wife even though she was terrified of what she might see.

Understanding. An infinite capacity to understand. An empathy that no one should have.

“He wanted to kill me,” she whispered raggedly.

Arizona’s eyes were rimmed with red. “I know,” was her weak reply.

Callie shrugged and her voice cracked, “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

And still Arizona could only nod. Her eyes were glassy. She knew. She knew what it was like to have someone want to kill you. She knew a feeling no one should ever have to feel and one Callie had been fortunate enough to be sheltered from nearly her entire life.

Even the shooter—her heart beat so fast that day. The rage and malcontent in his eyes shook her to her core. But Gregg. Gregg knew her name. Stalked her. Came. **For her**.

Despair gnawed at her and she pulled her gloves off and scooted away from the stain—nearly cleaned. “How do you survive it?”

Arizona said nothing.

“How do you get past it? Because I can feel him. It doesn’t even hurt. I just feel the—the **violence**.”

“I wish I knew,” her wife said. There was longing in her voice. Genuine longing. She stared at Callie but she was somewhere else. Reliving her own misfortunes. Her own attack.

“Arizona?”

Her wife’s eyes were sunken. The exhaustion of the day present on her face.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She’d told Callie some of it. Said there’d been an altercation and it had been violent and he’d gone to jail and she’d spent a month unable to do surgery. But there’d been no emotion in what she’d said. No hint that it still effected her. Callie had taken the information in and just been so relieved that Arizona was actually saying **anything**.

Arizona stepped around the stain—nearly clean and sat against the kitchen wall. She was still there—wherever there was—processing it all.

“When I was with Jane I don’t think it mattered.” She squinted at nothing. “She’s just—she could handle all this and I kept telling myself I could too because I wanted to be with her.” Her eyes flickered to Callie. They were naked with fear. “But I couldn’t. I can’t.” She rubbed at her eyes in a physical attempt the push it all away. 

Callie pushed herself closer on her knees.

Arizona looked back up at her. Her pupils dilated as Callie blocked some of the light behind them. “He came after you twice and I know I’m supposed to just accept it and be happy you’re alive—that we’re alive, but I can’t.”

She was shivering all over again.

“I put you in this Callie—“

“Arizona—“

“No,” her retort was sharp. There was more strength in it then she’d seen in her wife in a day. “No I did this to us. I did this to you. I—“

She surged across the gap between them, grasping the sides of Arizona’s head and forcing her into a kiss Callie needed her to feel with ever fiber of her being. Arizona seemed to bolt at first. She jerked in Callie’s hands and tried to gasp a protestation but Callie kept kissing her—as if the contact of her lips on Arizona’s would take all the confusing and horrifying feelings away.

 

####

When Hamilton Gregg cut Jane’s carotid artery the oxygenated blood that should have fueled her brain instead spilled out on the floor. Jane had a strong heart. It beat fast and sure, and she had a clever mind. It could dissect a crime scene as cleanly as Maura could dissect a body. But the path between the two was cut by a kitchen knife.

Her brain was starved. The stroke was inevitable.

At least because of where she’d been. If it has happened in an OR they could have stopped it. As it were a famous surgeon stemmed the flow of blood and to keep her in a less sever degree of hypovolemic shock. Then he transported her to the OR where he crafted a crude method of reestablishing blood flow. That helped temper the severity of the stroke.

Jane slept.

He went back in and created something long lasting. 

Jane slept more. Maura and Angela sat by her bedside. Maura met the woman that could pull Jane across the country with a phone call. Maura watched another woman violently halt Hamilton Gregg’s brief reign of terror.

And it shocked her how satisfied she was by his screams.

Maura considered herself a kind woman. She knew she had some difficulty with interpersonal relationships and she knew she wasn’t overly fond of heightened emotions. She didn’t like watching people cry and she didn’t like seeing people in pain. But she liked protecting people. She liked helping people. It was why she chose her avenue of medicine.

But Gregg’s scream as a heel crunched his broken hand into the ungiving tile floor brought with it perverse pleasure.

He’d nearly killed Jane and while the court’s justice might not be swift and she had no desire to see him die she did, desperately, want to hurt him. It terrified her. Because it wasn’t the first time she felt her emotions race out of control because of Jane.

She was upset Jane had flown across the country for Dr. Robbins? But what had she done? She flew across the country to provide comfort and counsel for her best friend and her family. Jane made the trip for an ex-fiancee.

A woman. Who was her ex.

Why did it bother Maura so much that Jane was bisexual?

Maura herself never especially considered sexuality. It wasn’t something she agonized over. While she preferred feel of a stubbled cheek pressed against her own she could understand the allure of a woman. She’d never felt compelled to sleep with a woman but she would never limit herself by outright rejecting a woman.

So why was it so shocking? Why did she find herself staring at the sharp lines of Jane’s face while she slept and…feeling immeasurably disappointed?

Jane hadn’t lied to her. She could recall no moment where she directly asked Jane about her sexuality. Yet the fiancee, the long term relationship with a woman—it was evidence of omission.

Which felt much worse than a lie should have.

“Why didn’t she tell me,” she asked Angela while the other woman stared at Jane.

Angela’s voice was rough. She’d been crying again. “Ask you what?” 

“I’m her best friend and yet, there’s this whole span of her life I knew nothing about.”

Angela continued to study her daughter’s still form, “I don’t think it was on purpose. She and Arizona broke up and she was hurt.”

“Yes, but you talk about it when you’re hurt. You have to process your emotions to fully overcome past hardships.”

“You know Jane. She processes it all internally.”

“But she doesn’t.”

Angela looked up at her curiously.

“She tells me things—told me things she never would have told someone else. We talked—talk about—“ about Jane’s fears, her love, her concerns for her family. “She was always confiding in me. But never about this.”

“Maybe she wanted to protect you.”

Maura tried to protest that but Angela continued. 

“I mean it. Maura you idolize her. You idolize each other. And I think, with Gregg and then with how it ended with Arizona, she’s ashamed you know?”

“No, I don’t.”

 

####

“Jane stop pacing.”

She couldn’t stop. Her girlfriend’s face looked a step above hamburger and the guy that’d done it to her was sitting in jail with nothing more than an assault charge between him and freedom.

“They didn’t find anything,” she exclaimed.

Arizona shifted uncomfortably on their bed, “I know. You said that already.”

“There should have been something. Something we missed. Drugs or a shovel or rope.”

“But there wasn’t.”

She involuntarily picked her keys up off the dresser, “Because they didn’t look hard enough.” She shoved them in her pocket and made to leave. “I’ll go over there. Look around.”

“Jane—“

“No. This is bullshit Arizona. After all we did this guy goes away for nothing more than assault?”

The bruising around Arizona’s eyes made them all the bluer and her stare was cold. Almost a glare. “I know more than you do how awful this is.”

“Then why aren’t you mad?”

“Because I’m tired. Between work and recovery and this case I’m exhausted. I don’t have it in me to be angry. Because whatever else happens we put him in jail.”

“But—“

She held up her bandaged hand for silence, “Please. Can we not talk about this tonight? Can you just…let it go. For me?”

Jane **didn’t** want to let it go. She was a pitbull of a cop. She was tenacious as hell and it was going to have her working as a detective sooner rather than later. It felt unnatural to back down. Like she was fighting back against some primal urge.

But she still put her keys back on the dresser. Her shoulders dropped and it felt like defeat.

“Thank you,” Arizona whispered.

No. Not defeat. A Pyrrhic victory.


End file.
